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Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature.

The author of nearly fifty books, he was best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian future; for non-fiction works, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide-ranging output of essays. Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

✵ 26. July 1894 – 22. November 1963  •  Other names Aldous L. Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
Aldous Huxley photo
Aldous Huxley: 290 quotes34 likes

Aldous Huxley Quotes

“It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 22)

“The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 6 (p. 48)

“It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” p. 11
Do What You Will (1928)

“The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 168
The Doors of Perception (1954)

“The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 6 (p. 47)

“When will you women understand that one isn’t insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won’t allow one to have.”

Aldous Huxley

The Gioconda smile

“To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.”

Aldous Huxley

“Spinoza’s Worm,” p. 75
Do What You Will (1928)

“Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.”

Aldous Huxley

Do What You Will (1929)

“All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Pages 160-61
The Doors of Perception (1954)

“Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

“We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)

“Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.”

Aldous Huxley

“Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness.”

Aldous Huxley

“I don't like it,"" said Lenina. ""I don't like it."" She liked even less what awaited her at the entrance to the pueblo, where their guide had left them while he went inside for instructions. The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs, the flies. Her face wrinkled up into a grimace of disgust. She held her handkerchief to her nose.
""But how can they live like this?"" she broke out in a voice of indignant incredulity. (It wasn't possible.)
Bernard shrugged his shoulders philosophically. ""Anyhow,"" he said, ""they've been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by now.""
""But cleanliness is next to fordliness,"" she insisted.
""Yes, and civilization is sterilization,"" Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hypnopaedic lesson in elementary hygiene. ""But these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren't civilized."" ”

Aldous Huxley

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

Aldous Huxley

“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far?”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern."
The Doors of Perception (1954)

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

“The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy — that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning — is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality — theoretically and by hearsay — is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men’s cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

“I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World (1932), Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16

“Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which is attributed to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.”

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of London Chatto & Windus, London, (1951) p. 274

“It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.”

Aldous Huxley

Source: Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 4

“'Our kingdom go' is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.”

Aldous Huxley book The Perennial Philosophy

Source: The Perennial Philosophy (1945), Chapter VI - Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood

“Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

"Brave New World Revisited" (1956), in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977), p. 99