Aldous Huxley

Who was Aldous Huxley?

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and a prominent member of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular Vivekananda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism. He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs.

By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.

Famous Quotes:

• Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
• The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
• We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
• Classic 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 more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
• From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
• Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
• Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
• Every man's memory is his private literature.
• The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.