Aldous Huxley

Novelist

1894-07-26 – 1963-11-22

Aldous Huxley was an English writer and critic best known for the novel Brave New World and essays on science, culture, and consciousness.

Books by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World
View on Amazon
Crome yellow
View on Amazon
Island
View on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Quotes by Aldous Huxley

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Read quote
Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells.
Read quote
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
Read quote
Every one belongs to every one else.
Read quote
People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning
Read quote
Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.
Read quote
No social stability without individual stability.
Read quote
It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter
Read quote
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
Read quote
He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.
Read quote
Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.
Read quote
However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
Read quote
...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....
Read quote
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
Read quote
Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.
Read quote
All right then, said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. There was a long silence.I claim them all, said the Savage at last.
Read quote
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Read quote
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Read quote
Pain was a fascinating horror
Read quote
Nature is powerless to put asunder.
Read quote