Aldous Huxley
English writer, philosopher, and one of the great literary explorers of the perennial philosophy and the chemistry of consciousness in the twentieth century. Born in 1894 to one of the most distinguished intellectual families in England, he authored more than fifty books — novels (Brave New World, Island), essays (The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell), and his late masterpiece The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which gathered the testimony of mystics from every world tradition into a single anthology. His mescaline experiments in the 1950s pioneered the modern psychedelic movement; his lifelong study of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism made him one of the West's most credible bridges to the contemplative East. He died in Los Angeles in 1963, on the same day as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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Quotes by Aldous Huxley
106 quotes“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”
“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
“Liberties are not given, they are taken.”
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body.”
“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”
“The basic teaching of the perennial philosophy is that the divine Reality is immanent in all things.”
“Selfless contemplation is the highest of all human achievements.”
“The non-attached man is one who is freed from the dominion of the self.”
“Where the law is the safeguard of injustice, civilization is reduced to barbarism.”
“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.”
“Music is the brandy of the damned.”
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
“Mescaline taught me that the eternal is here.”
“The contemplative path may be entered through any door.”
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
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