Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 19

• I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.

  Aldous Huxley

  Believe, Mean, Profound

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• I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

  Aldous Huxley

  Here I Am, Doubt, Ignorant

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

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• You can't make flivers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they pratically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Mother, Children

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• 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”

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• A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

  Aldous Huxley

  Strong, Men, Air

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• 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”

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• Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

  Aldous Huxley

  Language, Tradition, Individual

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

  Aldous Huxley

  Beautiful, Army, Power

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

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• Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

  Aldous Huxley

  Practice, Tyrants, Majority

  Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.84, Transaction Publishers

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• The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.

  Aldous Huxley

  Religious, Differences, Effectiveness

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

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• Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

  Aldous Huxley

  Black, Victim, Century

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “Island”, p.69, Random House

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• There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

  Aldous Huxley

  Talent, Virtue, Substitutes

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• I don't care where I'm from, nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

  Aldous Huxley

  Care, Hell, I Don't Care

  Aldous Huxley (2010). “Island”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Infinite, Distraction

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

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• The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Science

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

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Symphony

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• To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

  Aldous Huxley

  Judgment, Wit, Admission

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

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• People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

  Aldous Huxley

  Silly, People, Lust

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• To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

  Aldous Huxley

  Inspiration, Writing, People

  Aldous Huxley (1999). “Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience”, p.214, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

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• I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.

  Aldous Huxley

  Writing, Ideas, Happens

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• I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

  Aldous Huxley

  Writing, Ambition, Men

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

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• The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health. We cannot ask for more from any system; nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask for any less.

  Aldous Huxley

  Giving, Desire, Relief

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• Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, War, Political

  Aldous Huxley (2017). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals”, p.78, Routledge

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• In life, man proposes, God disposes.

  Aldous Huxley

  Life, Men, Propose

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.

  Aldous Huxley

  Spiritual, Agony, Dying

  Aldous Huxley (1983). “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”, Harpercollins

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