Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 14

• Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.

  Aldous Huxley

  Destiny, Patterns, Chance

  Aldous Huxley (2010). “Island”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• 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

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• 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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• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Discovery, Finals

  Introduction to "Bhagavad-Gita : The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, 1944.

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• Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!

  Aldous Huxley

  Determination, Bored, Majority

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

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• In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

  Aldous Huxley

  Believe, Humble, Men

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

  Aldous Huxley

  Wisdom, Silence, Sculpture

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• It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

  Aldous Huxley

  Imagination, World, Realizing

  Aldous Huxley (1932). “Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley”

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• 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”

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• A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

  Aldous Huxley

  Smile, Men, Hamlet And Ophelia

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

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• To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

  Aldous Huxley

  Irrelevance, Psychology, Term

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

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• A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

  Aldous Huxley

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Point Counter Point (1928) ch. 13

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• Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

  Aldous Huxley

  Character, Fighting, Self

  Aldous Huxley (1993). “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel”, p.111, Ivan R. Dee

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• Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be

  Aldous Huxley

  Goal, Ought

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

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• Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Irrelevance, Origin Of Life

  Aldous Huxley (1992). “Huxley and God: essays”, Harpercollins

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• There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

  Aldous Huxley

  Enormous Quantities, Alcohol, Heaven

  Aldous Huxley (1999). “Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience”, p.32, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

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• There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

  Aldous Huxley

  Bad Day, Simple, Listening

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• Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.

  Aldous Huxley

  Two, Twenties, Done

  Aldous Huxley (2015). “Crome Yellow”, p.5, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be
  done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We
  are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand,
  birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.

  Aldous Huxley

  War, Hands, Two

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• 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

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• The flower of the present rosily blossomed.

  Aldous Huxley

  Flower

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

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• Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

  Aldous Huxley

  Speed, Modern, Pleasure

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Bombs, Anthrax

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

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• Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.

  Aldous Huxley

  Damnation, Sitting, May

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

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• Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

  Aldous Huxley

  Truth, Brave New World, Two

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

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