Aldous Huxley quotes - page 10

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both. (Aldous Huxley)
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national. View quote
Aldous Huxley
These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. View quote
Aldous Huxley
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. View quote
Aldous Huxley
I am I, and I wish I weren't. (Aldous Huxley)
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. View quote
Aldous Huxley
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization. View quote
Aldous Huxley
... two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is... View quote
Aldous Huxley
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. View quote
Aldous Huxley
First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world. (Aldous Huxley)
Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know-one can't escape it-but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows. View quote
Aldous Huxley
There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum. View quote
Aldous Huxley
It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I-or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace-cared to look at. View quote
Aldous Huxley
By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest-will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial-but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. View quote
Aldous Huxley