 |
Ignorance & Stupidity
|
|
Most ignorance is invincible ignorance.We don't know because we don't want to know.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Individuality
|
|
|
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Intelligence
|
|
|
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
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 one's self and life, and gradual growth of that understanding, which begins a spiritual awakening. The finding of God is 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
|
|
Life
|
|
|
A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Mankind, Man
|
|
|
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Memory
|
|
|
Every man's memory is his private literature.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Mistakes
|
|
|
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Morals
|
|
|
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
|
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Murder
|
|
|
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Music
|
|
|
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Mystics, Mysticism
|
|
|
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
|
|
|
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Organization
|
|
|
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Pleasure
|
|
|
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
|
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
|
|
Politics
|
|
|
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
|
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Prejudice
|
|
|
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Professionalism
|
|
|
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.
-Aldous Huxley
|
|
Progress
|
|
|
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterward, when you've worked on your own corner.
-Aldous Huxley
|
Books by and about Aldous Huxley