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Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 10

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One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Thinking, Two, Self

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

Men, Mad, Fool

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Dirty, Blessed, Acceptance

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.

Wise, Wisdom, Science

1944 Time Must Have a Stop

...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Dream, Growing Up, Future

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

One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice.

Names, Triumph, Prejudice

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

Reality, Common Sense, Brain

At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.

Sympathy, Pain, Eye

Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.

Letting Go, Art, Order

Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.

Dog, Rain, Pet

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

Majority, Logic, Reason

Aldous Huxley (1932). “Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley”

... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Thinking, Oneself

Aldous Huxley (2015). “Crome Yellow”, p.82, Sheba Blake Publishing

...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Two, Sorrow, Unnecessary

The only truly consistent are the dead.

Consistent

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Truth, Mistake, Men

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

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.

Fate, College, Expression

In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

Ideas, World, Obscure

Aldous Huxley (2015). “Crome Yellow”, p.22, Sheba Blake Publishing

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Book, Reading, Past

Aldous Huxley (2013). “Crome Yellow”, p.163, Courier Corporation

"Our kingdom go" is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is self, the less there is of God. The divine eternal fulness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing, and acting.

Thinking, Self, Feelings

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.

Evil, Mind, Prohibition

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

Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.

Jesus, Men, Names

"Do What You Will" by Aldous Huxley, (p. 3), 1928.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

God, Spiritual, Inner Peace

Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith (2013). “The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment”, p.15, Harper Collins

By comparison with a night-club, churches are positively gay.

Gay, Night, Church

Aldous Huxley (1932). “Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley”

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Political, Important, Capacity

Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.11, Harper Collins

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Art, Thinking, Littles

Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.236, Transaction Publishers

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