 |
Apathy
|
|
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Attitude
|
|
|
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Cats
|
|
|
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Drugs
|
|
|
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life”.
-Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, ch. 14 (1937)
|
|
Experience
|
|
|
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Facts
|
|
|
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
|
Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Fame
|
|
|
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
-Aldous Huxley, Miss Thriplow, in Those Barren Leaves, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1925)
|
|
Growth
|
|
|
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 long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
-Aldous Huxley, In Music at Night and Other Essays (1949). “Vulgarity in Literature” (1930)
|
|
Happiness
|
|
|
Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
|
|
Identity
|
|
|
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy [1946], Chapter 9
|
|
Intuition
|
|
|
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.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Journeys
|
|
|
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.
-Aldous Huxley, [found attributed]
|
|
Language
|
|
|
But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no pattern of words and sentences, however rich, however subtle, can do justice to the interconnected Gestalts with which experience presents us. Consequently the phenomenal forms of our name-conditioned universe are "by nature delusory and fallacious." Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk and read and write without taking language more seriously than it deserves. As the only begotten of civilization and even of our humanity, language must be taken very seriously. Seriously, too, as an instrument (when used with due caution) for thinking about the relationships between phenomena. But it must never be taken seriously when it is used, as in the old creedal religions and their modern political counterparts, as being in any way the equivalents of immediate experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the nature of things.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Morals
|
|
|
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Pleasure
|
|
|
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
-Aldous Huxley, The Fifth Earl of Gonister, in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, pt. II, ch. 4 (1939)
|
|
Poetry
|
|
|
The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Reading
|
|
|
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
-Aldous Huxley, Henry Wimbush, in Crome Yellow, ch. 28, 1922
|
|
Society
|
|
|
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. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
-Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, "Chichicastenango" (1934)
|
|
Technology
|
|
|
"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Truth
|
|
|
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-Aldous Huxley
|
Books by and about Aldous Huxley
