Aldous Huxley Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Suffering, Literature

  Aldous Huxley (1957). “Antic Hay: And The Gioconda Smile”

• Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Mind, Littles

• The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Thinking, Littles

  Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.236, Transaction Publishers

• The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Eye, Ducks

• Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Sublime, Action

• The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Self

  Aldous Huxley (2012). “The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West”, p.2, Harper Collins

• 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

  Art, Science, Intelligent

  Aldous Huxley (2001). “Complete Essays: 1936-1938”, Ivan R Dee

• We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Thinking, Feelings

  Aldous Huxley (1959). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

• If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Hypocrite, Hypocrisy

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

• Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Character, Exercise

• The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Simple

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

• When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Angel

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

• To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Animal, Mind

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Way, Reason

  "Island".

• It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Dangerous, Brave New World Happiness

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Men, Europe

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

• ‎"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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Brave New World, People

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “Brave New World”

• Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Wall, Doors

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

• From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Mean, Reality

  Aldous Huxley (1970). “Collected Works: Do what you will”

• Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Thinking

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

• Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Mind, Beginners

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.18, Harper Collins

• Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.

  Aldous Huxley

  Letting Go, Art, Order

• Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Political, Pageantry

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “Heaven and hell”

• Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Mean, Religion

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

• 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

  Art, Inspiration, White

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