Born in LA, Aldous Huxley was a commended writer and critic. As you’d find below, Huxley is well known for his pessimistic satire and wit. His works are filled with a lot of food for thought in the areas of science, technology and politics. The Brave New World (1932), a dystopian science fiction novel remains one of his best works.
Find some of the most thought-provoking Aldous Huxley quotes below!
24 Aldous Huxley Quotes to Spend Time Thinking About
Aldous Huxley Quotes on Solitude and Loneliness
#1. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies
#2. “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
#3. “In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody… Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” ― Aldous Huxley
#4. “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
#5. “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Aldous Huxley Quotes on the Cosmic Consciousness and the Great Beyond
#6. “I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film, of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow… Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty.” – Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell
#7. “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” – Aldous Huxley, Peter’s Quotations, Ideas for Our Time.
#8. “The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
#9. “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, The Doors of Perception
#10. “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” – Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
#11. “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley Quotes on Human Beings
#12. “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
#13. “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. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
#14. “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.” – Aldous Huxley
#15. “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” – Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts
#16. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” – Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will
#17. “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” – Aldous Huxley
Other Aldous Huxley Quotes
#18. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley
#19. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
#20. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley
#21. “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations 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, Brave New World
#22. “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” – Aldous Huxley
#23. “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.” – Aldous Huxley
#24. “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
The wit and satire that you find behind these quotes are certainly remarkable. Aldous Huxley was definitely a man of research and churned out golden sayings that are analyzed till date.
Image source: Aldous Huxley photo by SUZANNE RAGA
