Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 18

• The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

  Aldous Huxley

  Oratory, Matter, Politician

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• Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

  Aldous Huxley

  Self, Affair, Moments

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• Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Hypocrisy, Evil

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

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• But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Hipster, Brave New World

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

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• Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

  Aldous Huxley

  Passion, Civilization, Settings

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

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• The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.

  Aldous Huxley

  Interesting, Advertising, Modern

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2000). “Complete Essays: 1920-1925”, Ivan R Dee

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• 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

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• The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Eight, Water

  Peter Edgerly Firchow, Aldous Huxley (1984). “The end of Utopia: a study of Aldous Huxley's Brave new world”, Bucknell Univ Pr

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• Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cities, Joy, Los Angeles

  Aldous Huxley (1948). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Truth, Past

  Aldous Huxley (2015). “After Many a Summer”, p.160, Random House

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• The more stitches, the less riches.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Stitches, Riches

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

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• The social body persists although the component cells may change.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cells, Body, May

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

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• Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Two, Long

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• One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

  Aldous Huxley

  Character, Home, Men

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

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• [I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

  Aldous Huxley

  Soul, Captains, Fate And Destiny

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

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• The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

  Aldous Huxley

  Christian, Ideas, Perfect

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

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• The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Animal, Humanity

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• The proper study of mankind is books.

  Aldous Huxley

  Reading, Book, Study

  Crome Yellow (1921) ch. 28

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• The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is.

  Aldous Huxley

  Morning, Men, Facts

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• Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

  Aldous Huxley

  Evil, Necessary Evil, Chaos

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

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• Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

  Aldous Huxley

  Fun, War, Yesterday

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• I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

  Aldous Huxley

  Wise, Angel, Vanity

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

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• A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hands, Mind, Tails

  Aldous Huxley (1971). “The collected poetry of Aldous Huxley”

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• One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Thinking, Cases

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

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• What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

  Aldous Huxley

  Looks, Wonder, Divine

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

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