Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 20

• Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.

  Aldous Huxley

  Queens, Eye, Desire

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• Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

  Aldous Huxley

  Too Much, Brave New World Happiness, Brave New World Freedom

  "Brave New World". Book by Aldous Huxley, Chapter 16, 1932.

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• There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Kind

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

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• Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

  Aldous Huxley

  Country, Sea, Office

  Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) p. 34

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• Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mind, Use, Unqualified

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

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• 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”

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• 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”

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• I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

  Aldous Huxley

  Morning, Flower, Miracle

  1954 The Doors of Perception.

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• To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, People, Profound

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

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• Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

  Aldous Huxley

  Nature, Environment, Prosperity

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

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• To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in the their advance towards man's final end.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Philosophy, Mean

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• Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

  Aldous Huxley

  Girl, Home, Boys

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

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• Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Character, Exercise

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• Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Cold, Made

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

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• The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord - a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.

  Aldous Huxley

  Simple, Keys, Light

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

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• I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

  Aldous Huxley

  Passion, Want, Feels

  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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• The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Inspiration, White

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• Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.

  Aldous Huxley

  Girl, Being In Love, Illustration

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• Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

  Aldous Huxley

  Book, Brave New World, Culture

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

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• Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

  Aldous Huxley

  Math, Negative, Invention

  Aldous Huxley (1961). “Selected Essays”

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• I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.

  Aldous Huxley

  Europe, World, Results

  "Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual". Book by Nicholas Murray, www.theguardian.com.

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• Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

  Aldous Huxley

  Travel, Heart, Cutting

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

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• What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hero, Son, Thinking

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

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• It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

  Aldous Huxley

  Good Morning, Truth, Men

  Aldous Huxley (1943). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

  Aldous Huxley

  Character, Mean, Fiction

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.22, Harper Collins

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