Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Philosopher, Writer

see also: Brave New World

Sourced:

• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
  • Proper Studies (1927)

• Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
  • Texts and Pretexts (1932)

• Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
  • Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

• Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
  • Essay "Distractions I" in Christopher Isherwood's Vedanta for the Western World (1945)

• 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.
  • The Doors of Perception (1954)

• Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
  • The Doors of Perception (1954)

Attributed

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

• An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

• 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.

• Experience teaches only the teachable.

• Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

• Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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

• That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

• The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

• The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. (1937)

• There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

• If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

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

• As long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

• The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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