Vedanta
Aldous Huxley - Biography Aldous Huxley, was a British writer. He was born on July 26, 1894 and died on November 22, 1963. He would become most specifically known to the public for his novels, and especially his fifth one, Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Aldous Huxley was born on July 26th 1894 in Godalming in the Surrey county in southern England. He would be the son of the English schoolteacher and writer Leonard Huxley (1860 - 1933) and of Julia Arnold (1862 - 1908). More than literature, however, Aldous Huxley would in fact be born into a family of renowned scientists, with two of his three brothers, Julian and Andrew, who would be eminent biologists and a grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, who would be a famous, controversial naturalist in his time, nicknamed as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.
Aldous Huxley would come to be known mostly as a novelist and essayist but he would also write some short stories, poetry, travelogues and even film scripts. In his novels and essays Aldous Huxley would always play the role of a critical observer of accepted traditions, customs, social norms and ideals. Importantly, he would be concerned in his writings with the potentially harmful applications of so-called scientific progress to mankind.
At the age of 14 Aldous Huxley would lose his mother and he himself would subsequently become ill in 1911 with a disease that would leave him virtually blind. As if all of this was note enough, his other brother, Noel, would kill himself in 1914. Because of his sight he would not be able to do the scientific research that had attracted him earlier. Aldous Huxley would then turn himself to literature. It is important to note that in spite of a partial remission, his eyesight would remain poor for the rest of his life. This would not, however prevent him from obtaining a degree in English literature with high praises.
While continuing his education at Balliol College, one of the institutions at Oxford University in England, Aldous Huxley would not longer be financially supported by his father, which would make him having to earn living. For a brief period in 1918, he would be employed as a clerk of the Air Ministry, which would convince him that he does not want a career in either administration or business. As result, his need for money would lead him to apply his literary talents. It is around those days that he would become friends with the famous writer D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) at Oxford.
Aldous Huxley would finish his first novel, which he would never publish, at the age of seventeen, and he would decisively turn to writing at the age of twenty. At that point he would publish poems and also become a journalist and art critic. This would allow him to frequently travel and mingle with the European intelligentsia of the time. He would meet surrealists in Paris and would as a result of all of this write many literary essays. Aldous Huxley were to be deeply concerned about the important changes occurring at the time in Western civilization. They would prompt him to write great novels in the 1930s about the serious threats posed by the combination of power and technical progress, as well as about what he identified as a drift in parapsychology: behaviorism (as in his Brave New World). Additionally he would write against war and nationalism, as in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), for example.
One of his most known novels, and arguably his most important, would be Brave New World. Aldous Huxley would write it in only four months. It is important to note that at that time Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was not yet in power in Germany and that the Stalinist purges had not yet begun. Aldous Huxley had therefore not been able to tap into the reality of his time the dictatorial future he would have the foresight to write about before it had happened. Indeed here Aldous Huxley imagined a society that would use genetics and cloning in order to condition and control individuals. In this future society all children are conceived in test tubes. They are genetically conditioned to belong to one of the five categories of populations, from the most intelligent to the stupidest.
Brave New World would also delineate what the perfect dictatorship would look like. It would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be, as Aldous Huxley tells us, a system of slavery where, through entertainment and consumption the slaves “would love their servitude”. To many this would and still does resonate with the contemporary status quo. The title of the book comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610 - 1611), Act 5 Scene 1. Aldous Huxley’s novel would in fact eventually be made into a film in 1998. Although this one contains many elements from the book, the film would however portray a rather different storyline.
In 1937 he would write a book of essays entitled Ends and Means: an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization in which he would explore some of the same themes:
“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.”
In 1958 Aldous Huxley would publish Brave New World Revisited, a collection of essays in which he would think critically about the threats of overpopulation, excessive bureaucracy, as well as some hypnosis techniques for personal freedom. While Aldous Huxley’s early works would clearly be focused on defending a kind of humanism, he would become more and more interested in spiritual questions. He would particularly become interested in parapsychology and mysticism, which would be a subject matter on which he would also write a lot about. It is not really surprising, therefore, that in 1938 Aldous Huxley would become a friend of religious philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986), considered by some to be a mystique himself, largely because of his early association with the Theosophical Society, from which he would powerfully break away from. In any case, Huxley would become a great admirer of this one’s teachings and would encourage him to put his insights in writings. Aldous Huxley would even write the forward for Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom (1954). Tellingly, Huxley would state after having listened to one of Krishnamurti’s talks:
“... the most impressive thing I have listened to. It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha - such power, such intrinsic authority...”
In 1937, the writer would move to California and became a screenwriter for Hollywood. At the same time he would continue writing novels and essays, including the satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948). In 1950 the American Academy of Arts and Letters would award him the prestigious Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize that had also been bestowed to illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) and Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955). Aldous Huxley would also be the author of an essay on the environment that would greatly inspire future ecological movements.
The 1950s would be a time of experiences with psychedelic drugs for him, especially LSD and mescaline, from which he would write the collection of essays The Doors of Perception (1954), which would become a narrative worshipped by hippies. The book would also inspire the famous singer Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971), to call his band “The Doors”. Aldous Huxley himself had found the title of the book in William Blake’s (1757 - 1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
By the end of his life Aldous Huxley would be considered by many as a visionary thinker. The so-called “New Age” school of thought would often quote his mystical writings and studies of hallucinogens, and in fact it continues to do so today. Considered one of the greatest English writers having written 47 books, Aldous Huxley would die at the age of 69 in Los Angeles on November 22 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Aldous Huxley would be cremated and his ashes would be buried in the family vault in the UK.
Aldous Huxley would come to be known mostly as a novelist and essayist but he would also write some short stories, poetry, travelogues and even film scripts. In his novels and essays Aldous Huxley would always play the role of a critical observer of accepted traditions, customs, social norms and ideals. Importantly, he would be concerned in his writings with the potentially harmful applications of so-called scientific progress to mankind.
At the age of 14 Aldous Huxley would lose his mother and he himself would subsequently become ill in 1911 with a disease that would leave him virtually blind. As if all of this was note enough, his other brother, Noel, would kill himself in 1914. Because of his sight he would not be able to do the scientific research that had attracted him earlier. Aldous Huxley would then turn himself to literature. It is important to note that in spite of a partial remission, his eyesight would remain poor for the rest of his life. This would not, however prevent him from obtaining a degree in English literature with high praises.
While continuing his education at Balliol College, one of the institutions at Oxford University in England, Aldous Huxley would not longer be financially supported by his father, which would make him having to earn living. For a brief period in 1918, he would be employed as a clerk of the Air Ministry, which would convince him that he does not want a career in either administration or business. As result, his need for money would lead him to apply his literary talents. It is around those days that he would become friends with the famous writer D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) at Oxford.
Aldous Huxley would finish his first novel, which he would never publish, at the age of seventeen, and he would decisively turn to writing at the age of twenty. At that point he would publish poems and also become a journalist and art critic. This would allow him to frequently travel and mingle with the European intelligentsia of the time. He would meet surrealists in Paris and would as a result of all of this write many literary essays. Aldous Huxley were to be deeply concerned about the important changes occurring at the time in Western civilization. They would prompt him to write great novels in the 1930s about the serious threats posed by the combination of power and technical progress, as well as about what he identified as a drift in parapsychology: behaviorism (as in his Brave New World). Additionally he would write against war and nationalism, as in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), for example.
One of his most known novels, and arguably his most important, would be Brave New World. Aldous Huxley would write it in only four months. It is important to note that at that time Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was not yet in power in Germany and that the Stalinist purges had not yet begun. Aldous Huxley had therefore not been able to tap into the reality of his time the dictatorial future he would have the foresight to write about before it had happened. Indeed here Aldous Huxley imagined a society that would use genetics and cloning in order to condition and control individuals. In this future society all children are conceived in test tubes. They are genetically conditioned to belong to one of the five categories of populations, from the most intelligent to the stupidest.
Brave New World would also delineate what the perfect dictatorship would look like. It would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be, as Aldous Huxley tells us, a system of slavery where, through entertainment and consumption the slaves “would love their servitude”. To many this would and still does resonate with the contemporary status quo. The title of the book comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610 - 1611), Act 5 Scene 1. Aldous Huxley’s novel would in fact eventually be made into a film in 1998. Although this one contains many elements from the book, the film would however portray a rather different storyline.
In 1937 he would write a book of essays entitled Ends and Means: an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization in which he would explore some of the same themes:
“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.”
In 1958 Aldous Huxley would publish Brave New World Revisited, a collection of essays in which he would think critically about the threats of overpopulation, excessive bureaucracy, as well as some hypnosis techniques for personal freedom. While Aldous Huxley’s early works would clearly be focused on defending a kind of humanism, he would become more and more interested in spiritual questions. He would particularly become interested in parapsychology and mysticism, which would be a subject matter on which he would also write a lot about. It is not really surprising, therefore, that in 1938 Aldous Huxley would become a friend of religious philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986), considered by some to be a mystique himself, largely because of his early association with the Theosophical Society, from which he would powerfully break away from. In any case, Huxley would become a great admirer of this one’s teachings and would encourage him to put his insights in writings. Aldous Huxley would even write the forward for Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom (1954). Tellingly, Huxley would state after having listened to one of Krishnamurti’s talks:
“... the most impressive thing I have listened to. It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha - such power, such intrinsic authority...”
In 1937, the writer would move to California and became a screenwriter for Hollywood. At the same time he would continue writing novels and essays, including the satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948). In 1950 the American Academy of Arts and Letters would award him the prestigious Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize that had also been bestowed to illustrious writers such as Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) and Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955). Aldous Huxley would also be the author of an essay on the environment that would greatly inspire future ecological movements.
The 1950s would be a time of experiences with psychedelic drugs for him, especially LSD and mescaline, from which he would write the collection of essays The Doors of Perception (1954), which would become a narrative worshipped by hippies. The book would also inspire the famous singer Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971), to call his band “The Doors”. Aldous Huxley himself had found the title of the book in William Blake’s (1757 - 1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
By the end of his life Aldous Huxley would be considered by many as a visionary thinker. The so-called “New Age” school of thought would often quote his mystical writings and studies of hallucinogens, and in fact it continues to do so today. Considered one of the greatest English writers having written 47 books, Aldous Huxley would die at the age of 69 in Los Angeles on November 22 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Aldous Huxley would be cremated and his ashes would be buried in the family vault in the UK.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. Aldous HuxleyAt least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas. Aldous HuxleyExperience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him. Aldous HuxleyExperience teaches only the teachable. Aldous Huxley - More quotations on: [Teaching] [Experience] If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military. Aldous HuxleyMaybe this world is another planet's hell. Aldous HuxleyMost human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. Aldous HuxleyThat all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent. Aldous Huxley - More quotations on: [Equality] The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. Aldous HuxleyThere's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Aldous HuxleyAfter silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley, "Music at Night", 1931 - More quotations on: [Music] Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley, "Proper Studies", 1927 - More quotations on: [Facts] Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. Aldous Huxley, "Texts and Pretexts", 1932 - More quotations on: [Experience] Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. Aldous Huxley, Vedanta for the Western World, 1945
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, Brave New World Revisited
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Do What You Will
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Grey Eminence
The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Proper Studies
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means
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, Brave New World
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Time Must Have a Stop
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, Texts and Pretexts
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Collected Essays
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays
When the individual feels, the community reels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
The flower of the present rosily blossomed.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Brave New World
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Those Barren Leaves
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, The Genius and the Goddess
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts & Pretexts
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Olive Tree
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Antic Hay
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Do What You Will
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Grey Eminence
The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Proper Studies
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means
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, Brave New World
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Time Must Have a Stop
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, Texts and Pretexts
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Collected Essays
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays
When the individual feels, the community reels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
The flower of the present rosily blossomed.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Brave New World
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Those Barren Leaves
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, The Genius and the Goddess
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts & Pretexts
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Olive Tree
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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, Antic Hay
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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