200+ Quotes & Sayings By Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (Hull, England) was an English writer and philosopher. His best-known work is the dystopian novel Brave New World. Born into a wealthy family, he began writing at a young age and by the time he was twenty-three had published his first novel, Antic Hay, which was well received by critics and readers alike. Huxley's early works include poems, essays, and short stories; several of these were collected in the volume Point Counter Point (1935) Read more

In addition to his writings, Huxley took part in the Montparnasse group of writers and artists associated with the modern art movement of Cubism. He also became interested in Buddhism after meeting the American philosopher Alan Watts during his visit to the U.S. in 1951.

He later visited Sri Lanka where he met the eminent Buddhist monk Bhikku Bodhi. He eventually traveled to Bali where he had a vision that profoundly changed his attitude towards life and writing: see The Perennial Philosophy. Huxley died of cancer on 22 November 1962 at his home in Ojai, California.

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Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. Aldous Huxley
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It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly — it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered. . Aldous Huxley
The trouble with fiction,
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The trouble with fiction, " said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. Aldous Huxley
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La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas. Aldous Huxley
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He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘ A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth, ’ said the Savage promptly.‘ Quite so… Aldous Huxley
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Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began. Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And...
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I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, " he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness. Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point...
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. Aldous Huxley
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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood. Aldous Huxley
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Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence – either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage. Aldous Huxley
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God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. Aldous Huxley
All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There...
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All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God. Aldous Huxley
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Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. Aldous Huxley
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There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.".." There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.".." But they used to take morphia and cocaine.".." Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.".."Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.".." Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.".." All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.".." Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.".." Stability was practically assured. Aldous Huxley
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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.'' In fact, ' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then, ' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'' Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all, ' said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome, " he said. Aldous Huxley
A felicidade nunca é graciosa. Happiness is never gracious.
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A felicidade nunca é graciosa. Happiness is never gracious. Aldous Huxley
Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of...
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Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here. Aldous Huxley
Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
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Only times and places, only names and ghosts. Aldous Huxley
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
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Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche. Aldous Huxley
The world and the friends that lived in it are...
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The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room. Aldous Huxley
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly...
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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. Aldous Huxley
I believe one would write better if the climate were...
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I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example... Aldous Huxley
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Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère, ” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions – as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend, ” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice. Aldous Huxley
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The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers, " said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to. . Aldous Huxley
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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. . Aldous Huxley
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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.. .. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. Aldous Huxley
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Aldous Huxley
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come...
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Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. Aldous Huxley
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And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse. Aldous Huxley
Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at...
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Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z.... Aldous Huxley
The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives...
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The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out. Aldous Huxley
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Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up — the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains. Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe. And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things, ’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers — the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus — and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce . Aldous Huxley
The only cure for science is more science, not less....
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The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied. Aldous Huxley
... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
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... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Aldous Huxley
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It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I, " "me, " "mine, " that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's. Aldous Huxley
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The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate. . Aldous Huxley
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The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it. Aldous Huxley
One of the principal functions of a friend is to...
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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
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And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know Aldous Huxley
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. Aldous Huxley
Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
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Liberties aren't given, they are taken. Aldous Huxley
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This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act. Aldous Huxley
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It must be something voluntary, something self induced - like getting drunk, or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to society. It's unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it? . Aldous Huxley
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What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning? Aldous Huxley
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On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question. . Aldous Huxley
I wanted to change the world. But I have found...
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. Aldous Huxley
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The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen. Aldous Huxley
Every change is a menace to stability.
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Every change is a menace to stability. Aldous Huxley
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to...
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One can’t have something for nothing. 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. Aldous Huxley
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Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Aldous Huxley
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I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever. . Aldous Huxley
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My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..." That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane... Aldous Huxley
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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
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It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience. Aldous Huxley
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Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything. Aldous Huxley
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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
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With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me. . Aldous Huxley
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Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Aldous Huxley
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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. Aldous Huxley
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. Aldous Huxley
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These, ” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant. Aldous Huxley
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But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind. Aldous Huxley
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My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. Aldous Huxley
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Nature is powerless to put asunder. Aldous Huxley
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Pain was a fascinating horror Aldous Huxley
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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley
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To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. . Aldous Huxley
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Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived. Aldous Huxley
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All right then, " said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."" Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence." I claim them all, " said the Savage at last. Aldous Huxley
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I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. Aldous Huxley
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...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.... Aldous Huxley
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The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. Aldous Huxley
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He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Aldous Huxley
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Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society. Aldous Huxley
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However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for. Aldous Huxley
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It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter Aldous Huxley
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No social stability without individual stability. Aldous Huxley
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Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time. Aldous Huxley
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People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning Aldous Huxley
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Every one belongs to every one else. Aldous Huxley
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Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells. Aldous Huxley
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Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity Aldous Huxley
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Aldous Huxley
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There was something called Christianity. Aldous Huxley
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In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words. Aldous Huxley
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Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner. Aldous Huxley
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Every man's memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxley
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It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Aldous Huxley
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What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate–to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse–touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash. Aldous Huxley
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Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. Aldous Huxley
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The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried. Aldous Huxley
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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. Aldous Huxley
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Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware, ” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really 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. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality, ” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed. . Aldous Huxley
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What fun it would be, " he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness! Aldous Huxley
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Choiceless awareness - at every moment and in all the circumstances of life - is the only effective meditation. Aldous Huxley
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It's dark because you're trying too hard, " said Susila. "Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. 'Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.' I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly–it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered. Aldous Huxley
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There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! Aldous Huxley
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It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other. Aldous Huxley
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With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf. "What a pleasure it is, " said Denis, "to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or trouble.. Aldous Huxley