Top 686 Quotes & Sayings by Aldous Huxley - Page 11

Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

God: a gaseous vertebrate.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east.

Cleanliness is next to fordliness.

Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.

The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.

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.

The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.

The only truly consistent are the dead.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.

I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self.

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

?"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.

Civilization is sterilization.

I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion.

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

No less than war or statecraft, the history of Economics has its heroic ages.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though

Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.

Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable

Drinking can not be sacramentalised except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair.

Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.

It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!

The legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

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.

The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.

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.

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

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.

Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

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.

Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.

In life, man proposes, God disposes.

One of the great attractions of patriotism

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock.