Aldous Huxley Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Struggle, Voice

• 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”

• We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hands, Solitude, Feelings

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.10, Harper Collins

• You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.

  Aldous Huxley

  Sea, Arrows, Mind

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books”

• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Agony, Bereavement, Suffering

  Aldous Huxley “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

• One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Punishment, Enemy

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books”

• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Suffering, May, Individual

  Aldous Huxley (1969). “Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley”

• Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man--a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.

  Aldous Huxley

  Stars, Hate, Men

  Aldous Huxley “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

• At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.

  Aldous Huxley

  Sympathy, Pain, Eye

• And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

  Aldous Huxley

  Past, Brave New World, Years

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Brave New World”, Spark Notes

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