Aldous Huxley Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

  Aldous Huxley

  Communication, Humility, Reality

  "The Doors of Perception". Book by Aldous Huxley (p. 22-24), 1954.

• That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

  Aldous Huxley

  Reality, Common Sense, Brain

• Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.

  Aldous Huxley

  Giving Up, Humility, Reality

• Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

  Aldous Huxley

  Ignorance, Reality, Ignored

  Aldous Huxley (2003). “Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience”, Crossroad 8 Avenue

• The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

  Aldous Huxley

  Reality, Rivers, Fiction

  Aldous Huxley, Huxley trusts and heirs (2013). “The Genius and the Goddess: A Novel”, p.9, Harper Collins

• Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

  Aldous Huxley

  Dream, Reality, Self

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

• Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

  Aldous Huxley

  Holiday, Reality, Brave New World

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

• People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

  Aldous Huxley

  Work, Reality, People

• Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Humility, Heart

  Aldous Huxley (2003). “Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience”, Crossroad 8 Avenue

• In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

  Aldous Huxley

  Book, Writing, Reality

  "The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley".

• 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”

• To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

  Aldous Huxley

  Animal, Reality, Goal

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

• The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Memorable, Omission

• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Passion, Reality

  Aldous Huxley (2017). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals”, p.153, Routledge

• 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”

• Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Choices

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

• 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”

• Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Reality, Discovery

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

  Aldous Huxley

  Holiday, Reality, People

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