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.
quotes in library
Quotes by Aldous Huxley
106 quotes“It is impossible to live consciously among unconscious people.”
“The doors of perception are cleansed only when we let go.”
“To see things as they are, undisguised by language and the petty self.”
“The Perennial Philosophy is the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.”
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.”
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything.”
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself.”
“The mystic insists that no possessions are real except the union with God.”
“It is in the language of poetry that the unsayable is said.”
“A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested. On the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop.”
“Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.”
“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance: we don't know because we don't want to know.”
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists.”
“The fall is into limitation. The rise is into the largeness from which we came.”
“To be enlightened is to be aware of the divine ground of all being.”
“Faith is having a positive attitude about something even when you have no evidence that it is true.”
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Explore More Teachers
Discover wisdom from 500+ spiritual teachers across all traditions.
Browse All Teachers