Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 3

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.

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

It's dark because you're trying too hard," said Susila. "Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. 'Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.' I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...

No social stability without individual stability.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…

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.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Nature is powerless to put asunder.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

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

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.

One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Liberties aren't given, they are taken.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.

For I am you and you are I.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.

There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

Every change is a menace to stability.

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Pain was a fascinating horror

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.

We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.