Aldous Huxley Biography & Quotes

Full name: Aldous Leonard Huxley

Date of birth: 26 July 1894

Date of death: 22 November 1963 (aged 69)

Aldous Huxley Quotes

Aldous started his writing career by publishing short stories and poetry. Other than his career in writing, Huxley was also a humanist and pacifist. We have collected several of the inspirational and best Aldous Huxley quotes that describe his thoughts on life, God, history, and many more.

• “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” — Aldous Huxley

• “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.” — Aldous Huxley

• “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.” — Aldous Huxley

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

• “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” — Aldous Huxley

• “That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” — Aldous Huxley

• “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” — Aldous Huxley

• “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” — Aldous Huxley

• “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” — Aldous Huxley

• “There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.” — Aldous Huxley

Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes, William Shakespeare Quotes, Nelson Mandela Quotes, Mahatma Gandhi Quotes, Alan Alda Quotes, Jeff Bezos Quotes

• “Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.” — Aldous Huxley

• “People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.” — Aldous Huxley

• “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.” — Aldous Huxley

• “For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” — Aldous Huxley

• “A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.” — Aldous Huxley

• “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” — Aldous Huxley

• “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” — Aldous Huxley

• “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.” — Aldous Huxley

• “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” — Aldous Huxley

• “We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” — Aldous Huxley

• “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.” — Aldous Huxley

• “All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting 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

• “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.” — Aldous Huxley

• “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.” — Aldous Huxley

• “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” — Aldous Huxley

• “No social stability without individual stability.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Death is the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.” — Aldous Huxley

• “In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.” — Aldous Huxley

• “To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I know very dimly when I start what’s going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.” — Aldous Huxley

• “People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!” — Aldous Huxley

• “Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.” — Aldous Huxley

• “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. […] 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.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.” — Aldous Huxley

• “For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.” — Aldous Huxley

• “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” — Aldous Huxley

• “A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Words are good servants but bad masters.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.” — Aldous Huxley

• “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.” — Aldous Huxley

• “There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.” — Aldous Huxley

• “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.” — Aldous Huxley

• “It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.” — Aldous Huxley

Related Stuff: Alexander The Great Biography & Quotes, Albert Camus Quotes & Biography, and Alfred Lord Tennyson Quotes.  

Early Life

He is known by his full name, which is Aldous Huxley. This is when Leonard Huxley was born: July 26, 1894. He was born in England. He was an English novelist and critic who had an acute and wide-ranging mind. Among the things people liked about his work were how elegant and funny it was, as well as how pessimistic it was. Brave New World, which was set in a dystopian London; The Doors of Perception, which talks about what happened when he took a psychedelic drug; and a wide range of essays were some of his best-known works.

Early in his career, Huxley was the editor of the magazine Oxford Poetry and wrote short stories and poetry for the magazine. In the middle of his career and later, he wrote travel stories, film scripts, scripts for films, and Aldous Huxley quotes are also very famous.

Huxley was a humanist, a pacifist, and a satirist who thought about the world in a different way. His interest in spiritual subjects like parapsychology and philosophical mystical thought grew later on. He also became interested in the idea of universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely seen as one of the most important thinkers of his time. In seven different years, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by other people.

Childhood and Educational Career

When Huxley was born in England in 1894, he was born in Godalming, Surrey, which is in the country of England. When he was born, Leonard Huxley was the third son of the writer and schoolteacher. He was the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, his great-grandfather was a well-known biologist and naturalist who was a supporter of it. His mother was a direct descendant of English poet Matthew Arnold, and he was named after her.

Julian and Andrew, Huxley’s older brothers, were both very good biologists when they were adults. Huxley himself had been thinking about a career in science since he was very young. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan Huxley (1891–1914), who took his own life after suffering from clinical depression. But while he was still a child, Huxley’s life would be turned upside down by a tragedy. The disease keratitis punctata made him go blind in 1911. His mother died in 1908. Huxley began his education in his father’s well-equipped botanical lab. After that, he went to Hillside School in Malvern. He went to Eton College after Hillside. His mother died when he was 14 in 1908.

In October of 1913, Huxley went to Balliol College, Oxford, to study English Literature there. In 1916, he tried to join the British Army in World War I. He was turned down because he could only see through part of one eye. Later, his eyesight was a little better. His job was to write Oxford Poetry. In June of that year, he got a BA with First Class honours.

Career

In his early 20s, when he was 17, Huxley wrote his first (unpublished) novel. Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1925) were all social satires that he wrote in the early 1920s (1928). He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1939 after Many a Summer. During this time, he worked as a screenwriter for Hollywood movies.

He wrote an introduction to the book Hopousia, which came out in 1940, and he did that (The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society). In 1939, Brave New World came out. Huxley had a long-term relationship with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, which was founded and led by Swami Prabhavananda. In 1953, he tried psychedelic drugs for the first time, but it was a safe one (in this case, mescaline).

Personal life

He was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, England. He was called “Ogie” as a child, which is short for “Ogre.” Huxley’s education began in his father’s well-equipped plant lab. Garsington Manor was the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell during World War I. Huxley worked as a farm worker there.

There, he met a lot of people from Bloomsbury, like Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921), he made fun of the Garsington way of life. In 1919, he also made progress in his personal life. He married Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, at Garsington. Matthew was born the next year. Laura, Huxley’s second wife and the person who would write a biography of their lives together, married him in 1956. This Timeless Moment is the title of the book (1968).

Death

In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with cancer. He kept exploring both the world around him and inside himself, and he shared his findings through his work. At 5:20 p.m. on November 22, 1963, Huxley died. He was 69 years old. It was hard for the media to talk about Huxley’s death because President John F. Kennedy was killed on the same day. A memorial service was held in London in December 1963 for Huxley. His older brother, Julian, led the service, and his ashes were buried in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, which is near the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a small village near Guildford.

Honors and Awards

On April 9, 1962, the Royal Society of Literature, the most important literary group in Britain, told Huxley that he had been elected a Companion of Literature. He accepted the title by letter on April 28, 1962. At the Cambridge University Library, there are copies of the correspondence between Huxley and the group. The society asked Huxley to come to a banquet and give a speech at Somerset House, London, in June 1963, when he was a member. Huxley wrote a rough draught of the speech he was going to give at the society. However, his health was getting worse and he would not be able to make it.

In seven different years, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by other people. During the year of 1939, James Tait Black won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for After Many a Summer Dies the Swan). It was given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959. (for Brave New World). In 1962, the Companion of Literature (Royal Society of Literature)