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About Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank .

Popular Aldous Leonard Huxley Quotes

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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.

So long as men worship dictators, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it — only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.

Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends....

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases — you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too. *Training and instruction during sleep.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) English novelist, critic Grey Eminence, ch. 10 (1941).

It is far easier to write ten passable effective sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

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

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that is your own self.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

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.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons — that's philosophy.

Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail’s a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God’s goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.

The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.

The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Genius is a child up to the age of ten.

Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer nonsense.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of church going.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat, when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. No man has ever dared to proclaim his illicit amours so frankly as this same tom caterwauling on the tiles.

A bad book is as much labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Quoting that which was spoken of the young Archimedes: ... [he] was as much enchanted by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the boiler; more enchanted, perhaps for the engine would have got broken, and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm, while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities.

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

The traveler's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be An actor as well as a spectator.

The word prayer is applied to at least four distinct procedures: petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

Rites, sacraments, and ceremonials are valuable to the extent that they remind those who take part in them of the true Nature of Things.

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

The proper study of mankind is books.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself As an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

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