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Aldous Huxley Quotes about Reality

All Aldous Huxley Quotes Abuse Addiction Advertising Age Alcohol Anarchy Art Atheism Belief Brave New World Chaos Character Children Choices Christianity Communication Consciousness Contemplation Country Culture Death Democracy Desire Destiny Dictator Doubt Dying Economics Education Effort Environment Evil Experience Fate Fear Feelings Freedom Funny Genius Giving God Goodness Grace Gratitude Happiness Health Heart Heaven Hell History Holiday Home Horror Humanity Humility Hurt Hypocrisy Ignorance Insanity Inspirational Inspiring Intuition Journey Joy Justice Kissing Knowledge Language Learning Liberty Life Listening Literature Love Lust Lying Madness Memories Morality Morning Motivational Music Nature Pain Passion Past Peace Personality Philosophy Pleasure Politics Positive Prayer Prejudice Progress Prosperity Purpose Quality Rage Reading Reality quotes Religion Responsibility Risk Sacrifice Science Silence Sin Sleep Society Solitude Son Soul Study Suffering Talent Teaching Technology Temptation Time Tradition Travel Truth Tyranny Understanding Virtue Vision Wall War Water Wife Wine Wisdom Wit Work Worship Writing Yoga

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Ignorance, Reality, Ignored

Aldous Huxley (2003). “Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience”, Crossroad 8 Avenue

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Work, Reality, People

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

Dream, Reality, Self

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

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Reality, Rivers, Fiction

Aldous Huxley, Huxley trusts and heirs (2013). “The Genius and the Goddess: A Novel”, p.9, Harper Collins

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the 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 bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Communication, Humility, Reality

"The Doors of Perception". Book by Aldous Huxley (p. 22-24), 1954.

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

Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.

Giving Up, Humility, Reality

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Book, Writing, Reality

"The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley".

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

Animal, Reality, Goal

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

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.

Art, Reality, Choices

Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Holiday, Reality, Brave New World

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

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

Art, Reality, Thinking

Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

Love, Reality, Discovery

Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.

Holiday, Reality, People

From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.

Art, Mean, Reality

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

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

Philosophy, Passion, Reality

Aldous Huxley (2017). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals”, p.153, Routledge

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