Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxleywas an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in English literature...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 July 1894
holiday reality brave-new-world
...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....
solemn cease
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
wish chaos
I am I, and I wish I weren't.
art thinking littles
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
real hipster brave-new-world
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.
cheating patriotic bully
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
reading book study
The proper study of mankind is books.
book fall reading
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
passion men history
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.
freedom food optimistic
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
fear innovation atheism
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
journey long intellectual
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
happiness brave-new-world joy
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
fear giving religion
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.