Aldous Huxley: Human

Aldous Huxley was English writer. Explore interesting quotes on human.
Aldous Huxley: 580   quotes 34   likes

“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.”

Aldous Huxley

It appears in multiple anti-vaccination books, all by Trung Nguyen and a co-writer, circa 2018. In September 2021 it is echoed everywhere, including medical-journal articles (on various subjects), with no source given. Right above the Aldous Huxley "quote", these books quote a much earlier anti-vax author. Coincidentally, that author says (elsewhere in his book) this:
Let us admire all-powerful Nature, which is not so easily brought into this serious and lasting disorder by our perverse intrusions; for otherwise, there would hardly have remained a human being alive.
Misattributed
Source: Christian Charles Schieferdecker, in Dr. C. G. G. Nittinger's EVILS OF VACCINATION https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dr_C_G_G_Nittinger_s_Evils_of_Vaccinatio/6CUaAAAAYAAJ, 1856, p.40

Science

“Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Foreword to the 1946 edition
Brave New World (1932)
Context: Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Science

“A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

World , Training

“Human beings are not born identical.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)
Context: Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations (1950)
Source: Brave New World

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

Aldous Huxley

The Olive Tree (1936)

People , Forgetting

“It's a bit embarrassing… to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”

Aldous Huxley

As quoted in Huston Smith, "Aldous Huxley--A Tribute," The Psychedelic Review, (1964) Vol I, No.3, (Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue), p. 264-5
Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

Life , Way , Problem

“The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.”

Aldous Huxley book Ape and Essence

Source: Ape and Essence

Kiss

“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

Aldous Huxley
Fools , Appearance

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

Aldous Huxley

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
Source: Complete Essays 1, 1920-25

Stupidity , Spring , Motivation

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point

Life , Nature

“In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 12 (p. 113)

Nature , Time

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life , Truth , Religion , Knowledge

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Appearance , Animals

“Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity.”

Aldous Huxley

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life , Women , Men , God

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

Aldous Huxley

"Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)

War

“Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know, for the time being, that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot be reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experiences they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as "true" and morally valuable. Every man tries to pretend that he is consistently one kind of person and does his best consistently to worship one kind of God. And this despite the fact that he experiences diversity and actually feels himself in contact with a variety of divinities.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” pp. 3–4
Do What You Will (1928)

Men , God , World , Art

“Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 12 (p. 112)

Education

“To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” p. 3
Do What You Will (1928)

Religion

“Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?”

Aldous Huxley book Time Must Have a Stop

Time Must Have a Stop (1944)

Death