Aldous Huxley quotes - page 12

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful. (Aldous Huxley)
The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man. View quote
Aldous Huxley
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. View quote
Aldous Huxley
All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. View quote
Aldous Huxley
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. View quote
Aldous Huxley
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which is attributed to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him. View quote
Aldous Huxley
It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man's life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. (Aldous Huxley)
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. View quote
Aldous Huxley
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera. View quote
Aldous Huxley
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. View quote
Aldous Huxley
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear. View quote
Aldous Huxley
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. View quote
Aldous Huxley
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here. (Aldous Huxley)
In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living. View quote
Aldous Huxley
How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! ... Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury-inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. ... Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Rooted as they are in the facts of contemporary life, the phantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern Science Fiction are incomparably richer, bolder and stranger than the Utopian or Millennial imaginings of the past. View quote
Aldous Huxley