KEYS (10k)
8 Aldous Huxley
1 Tom Butler-Bowdon
1 Jordan Peterson
1 Jeffrey J Kripal
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
689 Aldous Huxley
4 Anonymous
3 Colin Wilson
3 Cal Newport
2 Stephen Fry
2 Jack Kornfield
2 Andy Warhol
2 Albert Hofmann
2 Alan W Watts
1:Evil is that which makes for separateness." ~ Aldous Huxley, @aax9 #KEYS
2:He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
3:Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley, @JoshuaOakley, #KEYS
4:The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
5:The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
~ Aldous Huxley,#KEYS
6:I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. ~ Aldous Huxley, @JoshuaOakley, #KEYS
7:According to Aldous Huxley, some of the books on his shelves glowed with a special energy or living power. They were alive, and they were beautiful. ~ Jeffrey J Kripal, #KEYS
8:Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
9:The perfect dictatorship 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 a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
10:Jordan Peterson's Book List
1. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
2. 1984 - George Orwell
3. Road To Wigan Pier - George Orwell
4. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Beyond Good And Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
7. Ordinary Men - Christopher Browning
8. The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
9. The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
10. Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, & Vol. 3) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
11. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
12. Modern Man in Search of A Soul - Carl Jung
13. Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan B. Peterson
14. A History of Religious Ideas (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3) - Mircea Eliade
15. Affective Neuroscience - Jaak Panksepp ~ Jordan Peterson,#KEYS
11:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#KEYS
1:God: a gaseous vertebrate. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 2:Ending is better than mending. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 3:If you want to write, keep cats. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 4:In life, man proposes, God disposes. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 5:The more you know, the more you see. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 6:Experience teaches only the teachable. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 7:Words are good servants but bad masters. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 8:We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 9:Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 10:A man can smile and smile and be a villain. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 11:If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 12:Generalities are intellectually necessary evils. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 13:No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 14:No social stability without individual stability. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 15:Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 16:One reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 17:Several excuses are always less convincing than one. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 18:Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 19:Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 20:An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 21:In real life there is no such person as the average man. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 22:Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 23:Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest? ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 24:Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 25:Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 26:Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 27:Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 28:Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 29:Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 30:How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice! ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 31:I am not the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 32:The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 33:A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 34:There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 35:Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 36:Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 37:One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 38:Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 39:All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 40:Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 41:Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 42:Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 43:Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 44:I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 45:Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 46:Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 47:Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 48:Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 49:Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 50:Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 51:In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 52:In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 53:Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 54:My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 55:Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 56:Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 57:Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 58:An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 59:Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 60:Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 61:Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 62:Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 63:Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 64:Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 65:Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 66:Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 67:The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 68:Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 69:It is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 70:Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 71:Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 72:Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and essnergy. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 73:Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 74:Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 75:If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 76:Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 77:All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 78:A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 79:Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 80:Happiness is like coke ‚it’s something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 81:If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 82:It is natural to believe in God when you're alone& 83:I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 84:Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 85:Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 86:A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 87:A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 88:That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 89:The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 90:Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 91:At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 92:Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 93:For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 94:If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 95:Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 96: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 97:Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 98:The creation by word-power of something out of nothing& 99:But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what is going on in his heart and mind. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 100:For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 101:Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 102:Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 103:Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 104:What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 105:Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 106:In other words, the highest form of the love of God is an immediate spiritual intuition, by which & 107:It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 108:Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 109:Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 110: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 111:It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 112:I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 113:Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 114:Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 115:Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 116:Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 117:But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 118:For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 119:Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 120:From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 121:Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 122:Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 123:If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 124:I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 125:In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 126:Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 127:Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 128:God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 129:No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 130:The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 131:Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who & 132: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, @wisdomtrove 133:Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 134:At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 135:Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 136:All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 137: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, @wisdomtrove 138:Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh? ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 139:It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than & 140:Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 141:It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 142:After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 143:For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 144:The divine eternal fullness 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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 145:I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 146:All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 147: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, @wisdomtrove 148:Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 149: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, @wisdomtrove 150: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, @wisdomtrove 151: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 152:I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 153:The nature of things is such that the unitive knowledge of the Ground which is contingent upon the achievement of a total selflessness cannot possibly be realized, even with outside help, by those who are not yet selfless. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 154:A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 155: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 believe in God. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 156:The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of man's overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 157:At 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-huxley, @wisdomtrove 158:Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 159:For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 160:For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 161: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, @wisdomtrove 162:Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 163:Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 164:Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 165:Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines? ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 166:To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 167: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 168:Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 169:The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 170:... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 171:But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 172:A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 173:When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins... and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure? ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 174:Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 175: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, @wisdomtrove 176: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, @wisdomtrove 177:& 178: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, @wisdomtrove 179:Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 180:The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 181:For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 182:When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.’” On another occasion someone knocked at the saint’s door and cried, “Is Bayazid here?” Bayazid answered, “Is anybody here except God?” ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 183:This state of & 184:Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 185: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 186: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 187:Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 188: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 189: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, @wisdomtrove 190:The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground—the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to “Die to self” and so make room, as it were, for God. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 191:Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 192:Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity... the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 193: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. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 194:There is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like “being” in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activity—“at rest, without parts or activity,” according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is “without a second” and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One “before whom words recoil.” Shankara” ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 195: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, @wisdomtrove 196:I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Dream in a pragmatic way. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
2:Happiness is never grand. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
3:God: a gaseous vertebrate. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
4:I am I, and I wish I weren't. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
5:Pain was a fascinating horror ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
6:Civilization is sterilization. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
7:Ending is better than mending. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
8:A gramme is better than a damn. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
9:If you want to write, keep cats. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
10:Let us be kinder to one another. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
11:Cleanliness is next to fordliness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
12:Everyone belongs to everyone else. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
13:The more stitches, the less riches. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
14:The more you know, the more you see ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
15:Can you say something about nothing? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
16:In life, man proposes, God disposes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
17:I'm claiming the right to be unhappy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
18:The proper study of mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
19:Every ceiling reached becomes a floor. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
20:Experience teaches only the teachable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
21:If you don't gamble, you'll never win. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
22:I like being myself. Myself and nasty. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
23:But every one belongs to every one else ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
24:The only consistent people are the dead ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
25:The only truly consistent are the dead. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
26:An irrelevance, and your life's altered. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
27:God in the safe and Ford on the shelves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
28:Liberties are not given, they are taken. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
29:Words are good servants but bad masters. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
30:A love of nature keeps no factories busy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
31:To be excited is still to be unsatisfied. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
32:We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
33:Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
34:One of the great attractions of patriotism ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
35:When the sun rises, it rises for everyone. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
36:A man can smile and smile and be a villain. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
37:Nothing short of everything will really do. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
38:The flower of the present rosily blossomed. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
39:One seventh of your life is spent on Monday. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
40:Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
41:If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
42:Only times and places, only names and ghosts. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
43:Try LSD, 100mg intramuscular... I thought so. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
44:The silent bear no witness against themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
45:To be a fool at the right time is also an art. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
46:I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
47:Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
48:When the individual feels, the community reels. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
49:Generalities are intellectually necessary evils. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
50:No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
51:No social stability without individual stability. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
52:One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
53:We can't allow science to undo its own good work. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
54:Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
55:Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
56:The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
57:The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
58:He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
59:It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
60:Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
61:Several excuses are always less convincing than one. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
62:Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
63:Aldous Huxley: “Liberties are not given, they are taken. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
64:I like being myself. Myself and nasty. —Aldous Huxley ~ Sophia Amoruso, #NFDB
65:Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
66:... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
67:We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
68:An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
69:In real life there is no such person as the average man. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
70:What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
71:Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
72:But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
73:Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
74:Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
75:Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
76:You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
77:Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
78:Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
79:By comparison with a night-club, churches are positively gay. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
80:Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
81:Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
82:Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
83:Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
84:Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
85:Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
86:We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
87:Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
88:Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
89:Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
90:Un mundo feliz, de Aldous Huxley, y 1984, de George Orwell. Esa ~ Zygmunt Bauman, #NFDB
91:Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
92:The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
93:The social body persists although the component cells may change. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
94:Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. —Aldous Huxley ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
95:Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
96:How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
97:I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
98:Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
99:Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
100:The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
101:Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
102:Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
103:[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
104:I don't care where I'm from, nor where I'm going. From hell to hell. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
105:There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
106:There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
107:life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
108:Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
109:One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
110:Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
111:To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
112:All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
113:The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
114:Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
115:To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
116:All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
117:Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
118:Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
119:Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
120:Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
121:Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
122:Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
123:The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
124:A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
125:Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
126:Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
127:I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
128:The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
129:Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
130:Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
131:People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
132:To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
133:Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
134:Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
135:Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
136:The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
137:We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
138:When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
139:The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
140:Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
141:Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
142:In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
143:There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
144:No less than war or statecraft, the history of Economics has its heroic ages. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
145:People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
146:The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
147:To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
148:Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
149:Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
150:Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
151:In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
152:In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
153:Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
154:Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
155:Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,’ said writer Aldous Huxley. ~ Rolf Dobelli, #NFDB
156:Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
157:There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
158:After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
159:Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
160:Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
161:Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
162:My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
163:Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
164:Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
165:The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
166:Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
167:All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
168:Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
169:Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
170:All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
171:An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
172:At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
173:Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
174:I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley. ~ Albert Hofmann, #NFDB
175:"All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
176:De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
177:Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
178:I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
179:In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
180:Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
181:When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
182:Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
183:I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
184:Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
185:The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
186:Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
187:The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
188:Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
189:Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
190:Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
191:Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
192:he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
193:I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
194:Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
195:The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
196:Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
197:The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
198:Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
199:Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
200:People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
201:People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
202:Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
203:In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
204:In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
205:Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
206:Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
207:They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. Aldous Huxley ~ Michael E Gerber, #NFDB
208:Aldous Huxley put it, “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. ~ Ruchir Sharma, #NFDB
209:Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
210:Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
211:The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
212:Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
213:...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
214:People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
215:The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
216:...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
217:In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
218:What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
219:You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
220:Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
221:Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
222:Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
223:Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
224:The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
225:The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
226:Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
227:An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
228:Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
229:Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29 ~ Misty Griffin, #NFDB
230:Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
231:The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
232:which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
233:Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
234:Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
235:Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
236:Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
237:...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
238:It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
239:On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
240:There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
241:Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
242:Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
243:Dedicated to all those who say: "I don't have time for analytics" or "I don't understand analytics". ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
244:Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
245:It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
246:Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
247:Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
248:The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
~ Aldous Huxley,#NFDB
249:There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
250:War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
251:All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
252:Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
253:The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
254:A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
255: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, #NFDB
256:Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
257:Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
258:Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
259:Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
260:Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
261:If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
262:People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
263:The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
264:Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
265:I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
266:Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
267:What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
268:The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
269:The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline toward the religion of solitude. –Aldous Huxley ~ Ella James, #NFDB
270:Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
271:I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
272:Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
273:You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
274:A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
275:When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
276:Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
277:Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
278:If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
279:Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
280:There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that’s your own self. —ALDOUS HUXLEY ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
281:The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
282:A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
283:L’expérience, ce n’est pas ce qui arrive à un homme, c’est ce qu’un homme fait avec ce qui lui arrive. Aldous HUXLEY ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
284:So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
285:That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
286:The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
287:They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
288:We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
289:A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
290:I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
291:Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
292:The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
293:We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
294:If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
295:The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley ~ Aletheia Luna, #NFDB
296:an old attitude quote by Aldous Huxley, “It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
297:Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
298:That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
299:Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
300:Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
301:It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
302:There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
303:These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
304: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
305:The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
306:Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
307:There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
308:We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
309:What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
310:Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
311:And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
312:At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
313:For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
314:The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
315:Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
316:But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
317:Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
318:A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
319:For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
320:The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
321:If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
322:If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
323:Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
324:There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.” ~ J J McAvoy Aldous Huxley ~ J J McAvoy, #NFDB
325:Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
326:If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
327:The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
328:The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
329:Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
330:Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
331:But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
332:If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
333:This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
334:I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
335:It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
336:Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
337:Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
338: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, #NFDB
339:Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
340:Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
341:Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
342:Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
343: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, #NFDB
344:For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
345:Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
346:Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
347:The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
348:The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
349:We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
350: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, #NFDB
351:I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
352:In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
353:I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
354:The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
355: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
356:What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
357:The lion will lay down with the lamb...but every morning they'll have to provide a new lamb. Maybe this world is another planet's hell. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
358:The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
359:...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
360:Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
361:Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
362:Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
363:Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
364:It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop) ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
365:The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
366:There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
367:Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
368:Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
369:That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
370:And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
371:The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
372:Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
373:No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
374:The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
375:Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
376:Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
377:Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
378:Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
379:Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
380:I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
381:Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
382: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, #NFDB
383:It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
384:No obstante, los Noailles me escribieron para preguntarme si no podría encontrar algún trabajo interesante para Aldous Huxley. ¡Deliciosa ingenuidad! ~ Luis Bu uel, #NFDB
385:The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
386:Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
387:Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
388:The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
389:Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
390:The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
391:It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
392:On his deathbed, Aldous Huxley reflected on his entire life’s learning and then summed it up in seven simple words: “Let us be kinder to one another. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
393:According to Aldous Huxley, some of the books on his shelves glowed with a special energy or living power. They were alive, and they were beautiful. ~ Jeffrey J Kripal, #NFDB
394:Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
395:Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
396: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
397:One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
398:We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
399:A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
400:Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
401:I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
402:It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
403:The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
404:The third petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done but their own. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
405:Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
406: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, #NFDB
407:When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
408:You know I just dispatched copies to Aldous Huxley & Ezra Pound—finally heard from them. And to Blaise Cendrars.‡ Also wrote a good letter to Emma Goldman. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
409: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
410:Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
411:Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
412:Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
413:One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
414:If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
415:The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
416:If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
417:Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
418:To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
419:"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
420:Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
421:Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
422:Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
423:Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
424:To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
425:For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
426:The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
427:Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
428:Everyone thinks this way at some point. The important thing is to power through and get to learning. If you really don't have the time Let Me Handle Your Analytics. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
429:From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
430:The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
431:The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
432:BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay ~ Tom Nissley, #NFDB
433:Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
434:I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
435:Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
436: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, #NFDB
437:My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
438:The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
439:You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
440:Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
441:Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
442:Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
443:If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
444: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, #NFDB
445: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, #NFDB
446:Drinking can not be sacramentalised except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
447:I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
448:The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
449:In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
450: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, #NFDB
451:Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
452:Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
453:Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
454:Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
455:Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
456:Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
457:Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
458:God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
459: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, #NFDB
460:No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
461:The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
462:As a bookish child, I would come to see the one-child policy as one of the most fascinating and bizarre things about the land of my ancestors, equal parts Aldous Huxley and King Herod. ~ Mei Fong, #NFDB
463:In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
464:Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
465: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, #NFDB
466:Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
467: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, #NFDB
468:As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
469:Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
470:The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
471:At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
472:A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
473:It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.' ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
474:Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
475:The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface . ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
476:All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
477:God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
478:I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
479:I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley. ~ Albert Hofmann, #NFDB
480: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, #NFDB
481:Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
482:No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
483:Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
484:"But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it." ~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World ch. 17 [2], #NFDB
485:The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
486:It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
487:The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
488:After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
489:For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
490:I will have no Parsons around me but such as drink deep, ride to Hounds and caress the Wives and Daughters of their Parishioners.A Virtuous Parson does nothing to test or exercise the Faith of his Flock. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
491:Aldous Huxley, a British novelist born in the late 1800s, said, “The Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own. ~ Linda Evans Shepherd, #NFDB
492:The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
493:All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
494:And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
495:I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
496: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, #NFDB
497:My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism . ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
498:Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
499:All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
500:Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
501: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, #NFDB
502: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, #NFDB
503: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, #NFDB
504:A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
505: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
506:The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
507:We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
508:I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
509:Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
510:The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
511:Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
512:The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
513:For [D.H.] Lawrence, existence was one continuous convalescence; it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life. What these convalescent eyes saw, his most casual speech would reveal. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
514:It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
515:Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that things aren't worse and of praising and thereby lifting the spirits of others. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
516: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, #NFDB
517:Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I - cared to look at. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
518:Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
519:I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
520:Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
521:Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
522:A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
523:Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
524:In one of his novels about a sterile and painful relationship, Aldous Huxley uses the expression, "the love of the parallels"--that hopeless love between two parallel lines which stretch out simultaneously but can never meet. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
525:Aldous Huxley, who was once a copywriter, said, ‘It is easier to write ten passably effective sonnets than one effective advertisement.’ You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it. ~ David Ogilvy, #NFDB
526: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 believe in God. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
527:One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
528:There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
529:We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
530:This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
531:A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
532:As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
533:Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
534:Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
535:For at 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 religious or political idols ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
536:Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. [Therefore be careful how you interpret your life. Don't think or speak negatively lest your subconscious and others take you at your word and you are hung by your own tongue!] ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
537:To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
538:When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
539:For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
540:The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
541:People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
542:The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, 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, #NFDB
543:For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
544:The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
545:Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
546:To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
547:We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
548:All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
549: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, #NFDB
550: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, #NFDB
551:Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
552:A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
553:The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
554:as Aldous Huxley says, “news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
555:Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
556:Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
557:Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
558:The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
559: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, #NFDB
560:Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
561:Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
562:Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
563:Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
564:Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
565:To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
566:Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
567:A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
568: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
569:The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
570:The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
571:Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
572:Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
573: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 Huxley, #NFDB
574:And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
575:Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well being. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
576:Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
577:If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
578:All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
579:A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
580:The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
581: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, #NFDB
582: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, #NFDB
583: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, #NFDB
584:... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
585:Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
586:Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
587:Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception. Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to. ~ Bill Bailey, #NFDB
588:I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
589: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, #NFDB
590:Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
591:Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
592:So now you can let go, my darling...Let go...Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes...Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
593:Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
594:Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
595:Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
596: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, #NFDB
597:But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
598: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, #NFDB
599:A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
600:One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
601: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
602:All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
603:Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
604:Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard? ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
605:Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
606:Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
607:The perfect dictatorship 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 a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
608:Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
609:If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
610:Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
611: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
612:The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
613:It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
614:Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object ... of that experience. ~ Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1944), p.45, #NFDB
615:In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
616:The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
617:To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
618: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, #NFDB
619:The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
620:Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
621:We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
622:There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
623:We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] 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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
624:I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.' ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
625:Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
626: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
627:The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
628:Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
629:[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
630:A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
631:Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . . ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
632:The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
633:The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
634: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, #NFDB
635:"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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
636:The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health. We cannot ask for more from any system; nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask for any less. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
637:Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
638:I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
639: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! ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
640: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
641:I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
642:The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal….In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited (1958) ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
643:The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one?s self. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
644:Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
645:Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
646:Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
647:What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
648:For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
649: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, #NFDB
650:I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
651:The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
652:There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
653:"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself." ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
654: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, #NFDB
655: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
656:In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual....Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
657:The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
658:Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
659:Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, #NFDB
660:Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
661:I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
662:You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
663:He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
664: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, #NFDB
665:There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
666: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
667:Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individual experience. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
668:Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
669:What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
670:The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
671:If the men of the Middle Ages... lived in filth and discomfort, it was not for any lack of ability to change their mode of life; it was because they chose to live this way, because filth and discomfort fitted in with their principles and prejudices, political, moral, and religious.... It was in the power of medieval... craftsmen to create armchairs and sofas that might have rivaled in comfort those of today ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
672:I brought something back from those experiences [with drugs] which made me softer, open to other ideas. And I've learned from listening to other people talk about their experiences, from listening to Bill Hicks or reading Terrence McKenna or Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. But there's always some dumb cop out there who says "We don't need another legal drug and there's psychological addiction and blah blah blah." ~ Joe Rogan, #NFDB
673:The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
674: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, #NFDB
675:This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
676:The legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
677: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, #NFDB
678: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. 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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
679:Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
680:Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
681:What drivel it all is!... A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other stringscalled political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbours for using a word they don't happen to like. A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
682:And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
683:a scientific endeavor can never transcend itself to select new goals. Only subjective human persons can do that. Thus if we chose as our goal the state of happiness for human beings (a goal deservedly ridiculed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World), and if we involved all of society in a successful scientific program by which people became happy, we would be locked in a colossal rigidity in which no one would be free to question this goal, ~ Carl R Rogers, #NFDB
684:It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
685: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
686:The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
687:Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
688: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
689:Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. ~ Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell (Smith, Grover (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus)., #NFDB
690:So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
691:A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
692: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, #NFDB
693: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, #NFDB
694:...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
695:It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
696:When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them. “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson] Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. Aldous Huxley ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
697:The man who has successfully solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds of data and symbols is a man who has no beliefs. With regard to the problems of practical life he entertains a series of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument. In other words, symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas, nor should any system be regarded as more than a provisional convenience. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
698:I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
699: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
700:Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
701:The real 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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
702: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
703:Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty? It's a problem in biochemistry and adult education. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
704: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
705: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, #NFDB
706:Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
707:When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.
“A man is what he thinks about all day long.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Aldous Huxley ~ Andy Warhol,#NFDB
708:The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
709:The very question of who counts as a human being is now being debated in a way our grandparents could not imagine. Is a cloned human being a member of the human community? What about the socially unproductive and the inconvenient, the gravely handicapped, the elderly, the unborn? If the question, “What are these putative people good for?” is the only question our cultures and our laws recognize, then we really are living in Aldous Huxley’s brave new world, and tyranny cannot be far around the corner. ~ George Weigel, #NFDB
710:Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
711: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, #NFDB
712:They all have mechanisms for taking in and processing sensory data—and they all have mechanisms for reducing the amount of sensory inflows. They possess what are called sensory gating channels—or as William Blake and Aldous Huxley more comprehensively described the phenomenon, we all have within us the doors of perception. Sensory gating channels can be thought of as tiny apertures or gates or doors in specific sections of the nervous system’s neural network. They are similar to the lens in our eyes ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
713:Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness. ~ Aldous Huxley, “One and Many,” Do What You Will (1928), p. 12, #NFDB
714: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, #NFDB
715:[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
716:Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn’t fit—well, that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation—the same sort of stretching and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science really got going into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past. These far from painless operations will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian governments. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
717:Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
718: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, #NFDB
719:The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
720:Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
721:You can't make flivers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they pratically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
722:The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
723:One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
724: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, #NFDB
725:I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
726: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, #NFDB
727: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, #NFDB
728: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
729:Aldous Huxley Gesualdo-tanulmányában írja, hogy a reneszánsz despotái milyen csodálatos komponistákat tartottak, szembeállítja a modern despotákat, és elrémül, hogy ezek milyen zenét részesítenek előnyben. Még hagyján. A rémület teljes, ha valaki látja, hogy a modern diktátoroknak milyen eszményeik, milyen politikai céljaik, de főképpen milyen tanácsadóik vannak. Lehet, hogy az angol esztétának igaza van, amikor azt mondja, hogy undor. Az ember attól is megborzad, ha arra gondol, hogy vizelete ezeknek a lényeknek vizeletével a csatornában összekeveredik. ~ B la Hamvas, #NFDB
730:Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, “An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity…the idea of endless progress is the devil’s work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
731:The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
732:Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
733: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
734:So, whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you're trying to force something that won't fit under the circumstances. That's a destructive waste of time. And if that isn't enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won't get anywhere in the long run... You know what the philosopher Aldous Huxley said? He said 'Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. ~ Tony Vigorito, #NFDB
735:The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
736:How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language—all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe’s stanza on the wall—was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and ein Tisch was that a table was the dining table in his mother’s house and ein Tisch was ein Tisch in the Cosy Corner. * ~ Christopher Isherwood, #NFDB
737:Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty? It's a problem in biochemistry and adult education. ~ Aldous Huxley, in an interview by Raymond Fraser and George Wickes for The Paris Review, Issue 23, Spring 1960., #NFDB
738:Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.” This is the most succinct definition of the wilderness I have found: the not-self. There, in the one place we have not remolded in our image, a very deep and ancient form of wisdom can be found. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote Albert Camus. ~ Robert Moor, #NFDB
739: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. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
740:Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
741:Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man--a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
742:Those who neglect the roots of order, one may add, are compelled to water those roots desperately—after wandering in the parched wasteland of disorder. Upon our knowledge of those roots may depend what sort of order America and the world will have by the end of this century. It may be the order of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, rich and dehumanized; it may be the garrison-state controlled by ferocious ideology, as in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four; or it may be an order renewed and improved, yet recognizably linked with the order that arose in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
743:... Bununla birlikte serotonin düzeyleri kesin olarak patolojik bir durumun varlığını belirlemez ve Prozac'ın varlığı, Kramer'in ünlü kozmetik farmakoloji tanımıyla işaret ettiği şeye, yani bir ilacın sağlatım değeri nedeniyle dğeil, yalnızca kişinin kendisini "iyiden daha iyi" hissetmesini sağladığı için alınması anlamına gelen durumu hazırlar. Eğer özsaygı duygusu insanın mutluluğu açısından bu denli önemliyse, kim daha fazlasını arzu etmez ki? İŞte böylece, bazı yönleriyle Aldous Huxley'in Cesur Yeni Dünya'sındaki soma'ya rahatsız edici biçimde benzeyen bir ilacın önü açılmış oldu. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
744:Their findings can be summarized in three statements which Aldous Huxley, following Leibnitz, has called the Perennial Philosophy because they appear in every age and civilization: (1) there is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change; (2) this same reality lies at the core of every human personality; (3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is, to realize God while here on earth. These principles and the interior experiments for realizing them were taught systematically in “forest academies” or ashrams – a tradition which continues unbroken after some three thousand years. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
745:W odróżnieniu od telewizji lub centralnego ogrzewania ognia można, rzecz jasna, używać również do gotowania. W domu często dumaliśmy nad niezwykle sensowną strategią życia w jednym pomieszczeniu – kuchni – w którym ogień ogrzewa, gotuje i bawi. Byłoby rozsądniej i oszczędniej przebywać w jednym pomieszczeniu, zamiast ogrzewać kilka pokojów, z których się prawie nie korzysta. Rozdzielenie ludzi od siebie to wiktoriański wynalazek. Aldous Huxley pisze, że korytarz wymyślono dopiero w XVIII wieku; przedtem przechodziło się z jednego pokoju do drugiego, w związku z czym cały brud życia był oglądany przez innych w o wiele większym stopniu niż dzisiaj. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
746:It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that nothing they can do can hold it fast. And this theme, implicit in Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and even more explicit in writers like T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, leads to a question, ‘How can man be stronger? How can he be less of a slave of circumstances? ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
747:There is a powerful case to be made that the innovations of the earlier industrial revolutions were of more benefit to mankind than those of the most recent one.11 And if the principal consequence of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence really is going to be large-scale unemployment,12 the chances are surely quite low that a majority of mankind13 will uncomplainingly devote themselves to harmless leisure pursuits in return for some modest but sufficient basic income. Only the sedative-based totalitarianism imagined by Aldous Huxley would make such a social arrangement viable.14 A more likely outcome is a repeat of the violent upheavals that ultimately plunged the last great Networked Age into the chaos that was the French Revolution. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
748:Jordan Peterson's Book List
1. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
2. 1984 - George Orwell
3. Road To Wigan Pier - George Orwell
4. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Beyond Good And Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
7. Ordinary Men - Christopher Browning
8. The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
9. The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
10. Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, & Vol. 3) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
11. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
12. Modern Man in Search of A Soul - Carl Jung
13. Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan B. Peterson
14. A History of Religious Ideas (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3) - Mircea Eliade
15. Affective Neuroscience - Jaak Panksepp ~ Jordan Peterson,#NFDB
749:By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough. ~ Gary Lachman, #NFDB
750:Mystics of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory…’ And he defines the real danger of this ‘lunar knowledge’: ‘It is perhaps well that so few believe in it, for if many did many would go out of parliaments and universities and libraries and run into the wilderness to so waste the body, and to so hush the unquiet mind that, still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass daily; for who among the wise would trouble himself with making laws or in writing history or in weighing the earth if the things of eternity seemed ready to hand?’ Aldous Huxley makes the same point in speaking of the effects of mescalin in The Doors of Perception: that in a world in which everyone took psychedelics there would be no wars, but no civilisation either. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
751:the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed. He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
752:Suppose it becomes the acknowledged purpose of inventors and engineers, observed Aldous Huxley, to provide ordinary people with the means of 'doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers, or members of a self-governing, co-operative group working for subsistence and a local market ... this differently orientated technological progress (would result in) a progressive decentralisation of population, of accessibility of land, of ownership of the means of production, of political and economic power'. Other advantages, said Huxley, would be 'a more humanly satisfying life for more people, a greater measure of genuine self-governing democracy and a blessed freedom from the silly or pernicious adult education provided by the mass producers of consumer goods through the medium of advertisements'. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
753:The real difference between the Marxian and the romantic Outsider is that one would like to bring heaven down to earth, the other dreams of raising earth up to heaven. To the Outsider, the Marxian seems hopelessly short-sighted in his requirements for a heaven on earth; his notions seem to be based on a total failure to understand human psychology. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We are typical expressions of Outsider criticism of social idealism.) Now George Fox combined the practical-mindedness of the Marxian with the Outsider’s high standard for a ‘heaven on earth’, and in so far as he was practical-minded, he failed to penetrate to the bottom of the Outsider’s ideal. What did he achieve? He founded the Society of Friends, a very fine thing in itself, but lacking the wearing-quality of older established sects; he conquered his Outsider’s sense of exile. And there we have it! As a religious teacher, he accepted himself and the world, and no Outsider can afford to do this. He accepted an essentially optimistic philosophy. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
754:he contrasts two pivotal works of dystopian fiction: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. “In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. . . .” Orwell, ~ Brooke Gladstone, #NFDB
755:When Postman wrote the introduction to his important book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he set forth the stance he adopts by contrasting the warnings of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think…. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.34 ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
756:On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley's wife] sent a telegram to his son, Matthew, urging him to come at once. At ten in the morning, an almost inaudible Aldous asked for paper and scribbled "If I go" and then some directions about his will. It was his first admission that he might die ...
Around noon he asked for a pad of paper and scribbled
LSD-try it
intermuscular
100mm
In a letter circulated to Aldous's friends, Laura Huxley described what followed: 'You know very well the uneasiness in the medical mind about this drug. But no 'authority', not even an army of authorities, could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous's room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give the shot- maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, 'No, I must do this.'
An hour later she gave Huxley a second 100mm. Then she began to talk, bending close to his ear, whispering, 'light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love … You are going toward Maria's [Huxley's first wife, who had died many years earlier] love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.'
All struggle ceased. The breathing became slower and slower and slower until, 'like a piece of music just finishing so gently in sempre piu piano, dolcamente,' at twenty past five in the afternoon, Aldous Huxley died. ~ Jay Stevens,#NFDB
757:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#NFDB
758:Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects.
...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close. ~ Stephen Fry,#NFDB
759:What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners. For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results, certain conclusions have emerged. (1) These substances do alter consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless to talk more specifically about the “effect of the drug.” Set and setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of reaction. There is no “drug reaction” but always setting-plus-drug. (3) In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about the potentialities—for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The drug is just an instrument. In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked first to the conventional models of modern psychology—psychoanalytic, behavioristic—and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects—philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals, alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported over and over by these persons. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
760:To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword and the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and trees.
"In As You Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes to live in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood, and in A Midsummer Night's Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood 'outside Athens' that is quite obviously an English wood, full of the faeries and Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.
"Pinned on my study wall is a still from Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage. It shows Victor, the feral boy, clambering through the tangle of branches of the dense deciduous woods of the Aveyron. The film remains one of my touchstones for thinking about our relations with the natural world: a reminder that we are not so far away as we would like to think from our cousins the gibbons, who swing like angels through the forest canopy, at such headlong speed that they almost fly like the tropical birds they envy and emulate in the music of their marriage-songs at dawn in the tree-tops....
"The Chinese count wood as the fifth element, and Jung considers trees an archetype. Nothing can compete with these larger-than-life organisms for signalling the changes in the natural world. They are our barometers of the weather and of the changing seasons. We tell the time of year by them. Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through the winter. I know of nothing quite as elemental as the log fire glowing in my hearth, nothing that excites the imagination and the passions quite as much as its flames. To Keats, the gentle cracklings of the fire were whisperings of the household gods 'that keep / A gentle reminder o'er fraternal souls.'
"Most of the world still cooks on wood fires, and the vast majority of the world's wood is used as firewood. In so far as 'Western' people have forgotten how to lay a wood fire, or its fossil equivalent in coal, they have lost touch with nature. Aldous Huxley wrote of D.H. Lawrence that 'He could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient woodcutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them and a floor after he had scrubbed it was thoroughly clean.' As it burns, wood releases the energies of the earth, water and sunshine that grew it. Each species expresses its character in its distinctive habits of combustion. Willow burns as it grows, very fast, spitting like a firecracker. Oak glows reliably, hard and long. A wood fire in the hearth is a little household sun.
"When Auden wrote, 'A culture is no better than its woods,' he knew that, having carelessly lost more of their woods than any other country in Europe, the British take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left. Woods, like water, have been suppressed by motorways and the modern world, and have come to look like the subconscious of the landscape. They have become the guardians of our dreams of greenwood liberty, of our wildwood, feral, childhood selves, of Richmal Crompton's Just William and his outlaws. They hold the merriness of Merry England, of yew longbows, of Robin Hood and his outlaw band. But they are also repositories of the ancient stories, of Icelandic myths of Ygdrasil the Tree of Life, Robert Graves's 'The Battle of the Trees' and the myths of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. The enemies of the woods are always enemies of culture and humanity. ~ Roger Deakin,#NFDB
761:We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. ~ Neil Postman,#NFDB
11 Integral Yoga
3 Occultism
1 Philosophy
6 Nolini Kanta Gupta
3 Sri Aurobindo
3 Aleister Crowley
3 A B Purani
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
3 Magick Without Tears
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsNicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
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William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
This latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.
A similar compilation was published in the Arya, called The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles ternelles, in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form: that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as they were in chapters and sections and subsections with proper headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence. Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text "That art Thou" with this saying of Eckhart: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without". It will be interesting to note that the Arya compilation too starts with the same idea under the title "The God of All; the God who is in All", the first quotation being from Philolaus, "The Universe is a Unity".The Eternal Wisdom has an introduction called "The Song of Wisdom" which begins with this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors".
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsGoe the
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Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A modern Neo-Brahmin, Aldous Huxley, has given a solution of the problem in his now famous Shakespearean apothegm, "Time must have a stop". That is an old-world solution rediscovered by the modern mind in and through the ravages of Time's storm and stress. It means, salvation lies, after all, beyond the flow of Time, one must free oneself from the vicious and unending circle of mortal and mundane life. As the Rajayogi controls and holds his breath, stills all life-movement and realises a dead-stop of consciousness (Samadhi), even so one must control and stop all secular movements in oneself and attain a timeless stillness and vacancy in which alone the true spiritual light and life can descend and manifest. That is the age-long and ancient solution to which the Neo-Brahmin as well the Neo-Christian adheres.
Eliot seems to demur, however, and does not go to that extreme length. He wishes to go beyond, but to find out the source and matrix of the here below. As I said, he seeks a synthesis and not a mere transcendence: the transcendence is indeed a part of the synthesis, the other part is furnished by an immanence. He does not cut away altogether from Time, but reaches its outermost limit, its rim, its summit, where it stops, not altogether annihilated, but held in suspended animation. That is the "still point" to which he refers in the following lines:
02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In ancient days and in some spiritual practice and discipline this fungus had a special use for a definite purpose. Its use produces on one a drowsy effect, perhaps a strong and poisonous intoxicating effect. What is the final result of this drugging? We know that in our country among the sadhus and some sects practising occult science, taking of certain herbal drugs is recommended, even obligatory. Today Aldous Huxley has taken up the cue, in the most modern fashion indeed, and prescribed mescalin in the process of Yoga and spiritual practice. Did the Vedic Rishis see in the same way a usefulness of Soma, the proverbial creeper secreting the immortal drink of delight? However, the Tantriksadhaks hold that particular soporifics possess the virtue of quieting the external senses and dulling and deadening the sense organs, and thereby freeing the inner and subtler consciousness in its play and manifestation.
Our poet too is saying something in the same line. He is appealing to the toadstool god to give him the right vision, to take him to the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, evenwhile in the physical body, existence in heaven,ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain of industry and is termed synthetic, that is to say, it means the skill and capacity to create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be repeated at will. Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of thingswhich again is a dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the result into its antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given humanity a new degree of self-consciousness.
It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over meansperhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical utility. Much of the knowledgeespecially secular and scientificin ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that knowledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim and concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems to which correct solutions were given of which the process is not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there was in fact very little of the process as we know it now the solution was reached per saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same manner as we find it happening even today in child prodigies.
1.00 - Gospel Preface, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
by Aldous Huxley
IN THE HISTORY of the arts, genius is a thing of very rare occurrence. Rarer still, however, are the competent reporters and recorders of that genius. The world has had many hundreds of admirable poets and philosophers; but of these hundreds only a very few have had the fortune to attract a Boswell or an Eckermann.
1.53 - Mother-Love, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The most far-seeing of our prophetically minded writers, Aldous Huxley, brands this black fact upon our foreheads.
The first condition of a "Brave New World" must be the dissociation of sexual from reproductive life.[110] The word "mother" must be as nauseating to all properly human minds as it now is to every one that has contemplated the subject with clear vision.
1.79 - Progress, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Isn't it Aldous Huxley who says somewhere that some species or other can never develop higher powers because its brain is shut in by its carapace? I thought this too, long ago; and I went into interminable conferences with my old friend, Professor Buckmaster; I wanted to extend brain surgery to produce the phenomena of Yoga. Also, I wondered what would happened if we wedged apart the sections of the cranium at, or shortly after, birth, so as to prevent them closing and giving the brain a chance to grow.
I suspect, by the way, that something of the sort is done in China and Burma; but the object is merely to produce megalocephalic idiots as a valuable addition to the financial resources of the family.
1.83 - Epistola Ultima, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley 248
Mr. Isaacs, F. Marion Crawford 255
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Poetry
Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley
A long quotation from Ends and Means was read out to Sri Aurobindo. He did not seem impressed. Then the following passage was read: "More books have been written about Napoleon than about any other human being. The fact is deeply and alarmingly significant.... Duces and Fuehrers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable."
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Poetry
It is because Western civilisation is failing that people like Aldous Huxley are drawn to Yoga.
28 DECEMBER 1938
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Poetry
Then yesterday's topic of Aldous Huxley's book Ends and Means was taken up by a disciple.
Disciple: Huxley suggests two ways of solving the problems of man. One, by changing the existing institutions of education, industries, in fact by modifying social, political, economic and religious institutions. This would bring about a change in the individual. So far as industries are concerned he suggests the creation of small units federated to a central organisation. Thus it would eliminate large units which are the roots of all troubles. The second remedy he suggests is to change the individual and make him, what he calls "non-attached", one who would practise virtue with disinterestedness. I believe there is a French author who also advocates such new types of industrial institutions.
2.2.1.01 - The World's Greatest Poets, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yes, I plead guilty. But that, I hope, will be no reason why Vyasa and Sophocles should remain unclassified by you. And the others they intrigue me even more. Who are these others? Saintsbury as good as declares that poetry is Shelley and Shelley poetrySpenser alone, to his mind, can contest the right to that equation. (Shakespeare, of course, is admittedly hors concours.) Aldous Huxley abominates Spenser: the fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using divinit, infinit ternit, as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose Hyperion compelled even the sneering Byron to forget his usual condescending attitude to wards Johnny and confess that nothing grander had been seen since Aeschylus. Racine, too, cannot be left outcan he? Voltaire adored him, Voltaire who called Shakespeare a drunken barbarian. Finally, what of Wordsworth, whose Immortality Ode was hailed by Mark Pattison as the ne plus ultra of English poetry since the days of Lycidas? Kindly shed the light of infallible viveka on this chaos of jostling opinions.
I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universeit was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enteronly Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus. The rest, if you like, you can send into the third row with Goethe, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.
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The critical opinions you quote are, many of them, flagrantly prejudiced and personal. The only thing that results from Aldous Huxleys opinion, shared by many but with less courage, is that Spensers melodiousness cloyed upon Aldous Huxley and that perhaps points to a serious defect somewhere in Spensers art or in his genius but this does not cancel the poetic value of Spenser. Swinburne and Arnold are equally unbalanced on either side of their see-saw about Hugo. He might be described as a great but imperfect genius who just missed the very first rank because his word sometimes exceeded his weight, because his height was at the best considerable, even magnificent, but his depth insufficient and especially because he was often too oratorical to be quite sincere. The remarks of Voltaire and Mark Pattison go into the same basket.
2 April 1932
3.1.04 - Transformation in the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In his book The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946, p. 74), Aldous Huxley quoted and commented on the following passage by Sri Aurobindo: "The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullnessto its heights we can always reachwhen we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing,' says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe." The Life Divine, volume 21 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO, pp. 13-14.Ed.
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Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
It is because Western civilisation is failing that people like Aldous Huxley are drawn to Yoga.
28 DECEMBER 1938
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NIRODBARAN: Aldous Huxley says Napoleon and Caesar were bandits.
SRI AUROBINDO: Nonsense.
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Nirodbaran read out to Sri Aurobindo some passages from Aldous Huxley's
Ends and Means. They were on war, passive resistance, non-attachment, the
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After this, Purani continued yesterday's topic: Aldous Huxley's ideas. He
quoted from his book Ends and Means. Huxley suggests two ways of change.
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NIRODBARAN: Dilip says that an English friend of his writes that Aldous Huxley has lost all his influence with publishers and modern writers since his
turning a mystic.
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
reminded of Aldous Huxley's songs of praise to mescaline; but Huxley
was neither a member of the medical profession nor the founder of a
--- Overview of noun aldous_huxley
The noun aldous huxley has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley ::: (English writer; grandson of Thomas Huxley who is remembered mainly for his depiction of a scientifically controlled utopia (1894-1963))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun aldous_huxley
1 sense of aldous huxley
Sense 1
Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
=> communicator
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun aldous_huxley
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun aldous_huxley
1 sense of aldous huxley
Sense 1
Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun aldous_huxley
1 sense of aldous huxley
Sense 1
Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
-> writer, author
=> abstractor, abstracter
=> alliterator
=> authoress
=> biographer
=> coauthor, joint author
=> commentator, reviewer
=> compiler
=> contributor
=> cyberpunk
=> drafter
=> dramatist, playwright
=> essayist, litterateur
=> folk writer
=> framer
=> gagman, gagster, gagwriter
=> ghostwriter, ghost
=> Gothic romancer
=> hack, hack writer, literary hack
=> journalist
=> librettist
=> lyricist, lyrist
=> novelist
=> pamphleteer
=> paragrapher
=> poet
=> polemicist, polemist, polemic
=> rhymer, rhymester, versifier, poetizer, poetiser
=> scenarist
=> scriptwriter
=> space writer
=> speechwriter
=> tragedian
=> wordmonger
=> word-painter
=> wordsmith
HAS INSTANCE=> Aiken, Conrad Aiken, Conrad Potter Aiken
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HAS INSTANCE=> Browne, Charles Farrar Browne, Artemus Ward
HAS INSTANCE=> Buck, Pearl Buck, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck
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HAS INSTANCE=> Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs
HAS INSTANCE=> Burroughs, William Burroughs, William S. Burroughs, William Seward Burroughs
HAS INSTANCE=> Butler, Samuel Butler
HAS INSTANCE=> Cabell, James Branch Cabell
HAS INSTANCE=> Caldwell, Erskine Caldwell, Erskine Preston Caldwell
HAS INSTANCE=> Calvino, Italo Calvino
HAS INSTANCE=> Camus, Albert Camus
HAS INSTANCE=> Canetti, Elias Canetti
HAS INSTANCE=> Capek, Karel Capek
HAS INSTANCE=> Carroll, Lewis Carroll, Dodgson, Reverend Dodgson, Charles Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
HAS INSTANCE=> Cather, Willa Cather, Willa Sibert Cather
HAS INSTANCE=> Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes, Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
HAS INSTANCE=> Chandler, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Thornton Chandler
HAS INSTANCE=> Chateaubriand, Francois Rene Chateaubriand, Vicomte de Chateaubriand
HAS INSTANCE=> Cheever, John Cheever
HAS INSTANCE=> Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton
HAS INSTANCE=> Chopin, Kate Chopin, Kate O'Flaherty Chopin
HAS INSTANCE=> Christie, Agatha Christie, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
HAS INSTANCE=> Churchill, Winston Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill
HAS INSTANCE=> Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain
HAS INSTANCE=> Cocteau, Jean Cocteau
HAS INSTANCE=> Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Colette
HAS INSTANCE=> Collins, Wilkie Collins, William Wilkie Collins
HAS INSTANCE=> Conan Doyle, A. Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Conrad, Joseph Conrad, Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
HAS INSTANCE=> Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper
HAS INSTANCE=> Crane, Stephen Crane
HAS INSTANCE=> cummings, e. e. cummings, Edward Estlin Cummings
HAS INSTANCE=> Day, Clarence Day, Clarence Shepard Day Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Defoe, Daniel Defoe
HAS INSTANCE=> De Quincey, Thomas De Quincey
HAS INSTANCE=> Dickens, Charles Dickens, Charles John Huffam Dickens
HAS INSTANCE=> Didion, Joan Didion
HAS INSTANCE=> Dinesen, Isak Dinesen, Blixen, Karen Blixen, Baroness Karen Blixen
HAS INSTANCE=> Doctorow, E. L. Doctorow, Edgard Lawrence Doctorow
HAS INSTANCE=> Dos Passos, John Dos Passos, John Roderigo Dos Passos
HAS INSTANCE=> Dostoyevsky, Dostoevski, Dostoevsky, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Feodor Dostoevski, Fyodor Dostoevski, Feodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
HAS INSTANCE=> Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
HAS INSTANCE=> Dumas, Alexandre Dumas
HAS INSTANCE=> du Maurier, George du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier
HAS INSTANCE=> du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier, Dame Daphne du Maurier
HAS INSTANCE=> Durrell, Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence George Durrell
HAS INSTANCE=> Ehrenberg, Ilya Ehrenberg, Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenberg
HAS INSTANCE=> Eliot, George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans
HAS INSTANCE=> Ellison, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Waldo Ellison
HAS INSTANCE=> Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson
HAS INSTANCE=> Farrell, James Thomas Farrell
HAS INSTANCE=> Ferber, Edna Ferber
HAS INSTANCE=> Fielding, Henry Fielding
HAS INSTANCE=> Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
HAS INSTANCE=> Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert
HAS INSTANCE=> Fleming, Ian Fleming, Ian Lancaster Fleming
HAS INSTANCE=> Ford, Ford Madox Ford, Ford Hermann Hueffer
HAS INSTANCE=> Forester, C. S. Forester, Cecil Scott Forester
HAS INSTANCE=> France, Anatole France, Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
HAS INSTANCE=> Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
HAS INSTANCE=> Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes
HAS INSTANCE=> Gaboriau, Emile Gaboriau
HAS INSTANCE=> Galsworthy, John Galsworthy
HAS INSTANCE=> Gardner, Erle Stanley Gardner
HAS INSTANCE=> Gaskell, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell
HAS INSTANCE=> Geisel, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss
HAS INSTANCE=> Gibran, Kahlil Gibran
HAS INSTANCE=> Gide, Andre Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
HAS INSTANCE=> Gjellerup, Karl Gjellerup
HAS INSTANCE=> Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
HAS INSTANCE=> Golding, William Golding, Sir William Gerald Golding
HAS INSTANCE=> Goldsmith, Oliver Goldsmith
HAS INSTANCE=> Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz
HAS INSTANCE=> Goncourt, Edmond de Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt
HAS INSTANCE=> Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt
HAS INSTANCE=> Gordimer, Nadine Gordimer
HAS INSTANCE=> Gorky, Maksim Gorky, Gorki, Maxim Gorki, Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, Aleksey Maximovich Peshkov
HAS INSTANCE=> Grahame, Kenneth Grahame
HAS INSTANCE=> Grass, Gunter Grass, Gunter Wilhelm Grass
HAS INSTANCE=> Graves, Robert Graves, Robert Ranke Graves
HAS INSTANCE=> Greene, Graham Greene, Henry Graham Greene
HAS INSTANCE=> Grey, Zane Grey
HAS INSTANCE=> Grimm, Jakob Grimm, Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm
HAS INSTANCE=> Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Wilhelm Karl Grimm
HAS INSTANCE=> Haggard, Rider Haggard, Sir Henry Rider Haggard
HAS INSTANCE=> Haldane, Elizabeth Haldane, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane
HAS INSTANCE=> Hale, Edward Everett Hale
HAS INSTANCE=> Haley, Alex Haley
HAS INSTANCE=> Hall, Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall
HAS INSTANCE=> Hammett, Dashiell Hammett, Samuel Dashiell Hammett
HAS INSTANCE=> Hamsun, Knut Hamsun, Knut Pedersen
HAS INSTANCE=> Hardy, Thomas Hardy
HAS INSTANCE=> Harris, Frank Harris, James Thomas Harris
HAS INSTANCE=> Harris, Joel Harris, Joel Chandler Harris
HAS INSTANCE=> Harte, Bret Harte
HAS INSTANCE=> Hasek, Jaroslav Hasek
HAS INSTANCE=> Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne
HAS INSTANCE=> Hecht, Ben Hecht
HAS INSTANCE=> Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Anson Heinlein
HAS INSTANCE=> Heller, Joseph Heller
HAS INSTANCE=> Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway
HAS INSTANCE=> Hesse, Hermann Hesse
HAS INSTANCE=> Heyse, Paul Heyse, Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse
HAS INSTANCE=> Heyward, DuBois Heyward, Edwin DuBois Hayward
HAS INSTANCE=> Higginson, Thomas Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson
HAS INSTANCE=> Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann
HAS INSTANCE=> Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes
HAS INSTANCE=> Howells, William Dean Howells
HAS INSTANCE=> Hoyle, Edmond Hoyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Hubbard, L. Ron Hubbard
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HAS INSTANCE=> Hunt, Leigh Hunt, James Henry Leigh Hunt
HAS INSTANCE=> Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
HAS INSTANCE=> Irving, John Irving
HAS INSTANCE=> Irving, Washington Irving
HAS INSTANCE=> Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
HAS INSTANCE=> Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson
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HAS INSTANCE=> Jacobs, W. W. Jacobs, William Wymark Jacobs
HAS INSTANCE=> James, Henry James
HAS INSTANCE=> Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
HAS INSTANCE=> Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson
HAS INSTANCE=> Jong, Erica Jong
HAS INSTANCE=> Joyce, James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
HAS INSTANCE=> Kafka, Franz Kafka
HAS INSTANCE=> Keller, Helen Keller, Helen Adams Keller
HAS INSTANCE=> Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
HAS INSTANCE=> Kesey, Ken Kesey, Ken Elton Kesey
HAS INSTANCE=> Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Rudyard Kipling
HAS INSTANCE=> Koestler, Arthur Koestler
HAS INSTANCE=> La Fontaine, Jean de La Fontaine
HAS INSTANCE=> Lardner, Ring Lardner, Ringgold Wilmer Lardner
HAS INSTANCE=> La Rochefoucauld, Francois de La Rochefoucauld
HAS INSTANCE=> Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, David Herbert Lawrence
HAS INSTANCE=> Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia
HAS INSTANCE=> le Carre, John le Carre, David John Moore Cornwell
HAS INSTANCE=> Leonard, Elmore Leonard, Elmore John Leonard, Dutch Leonard
HAS INSTANCE=> Lermontov, Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov
HAS INSTANCE=> Lessing, Doris Lessing, Doris May Lessing
HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Harry Sinclair Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> London, Jack London, John Griffith Chaney
HAS INSTANCE=> Lowry, Malcolm Lowry, Clarence Malcolm Lowry
HAS INSTANCE=> Lyly, John Lyly
HAS INSTANCE=> Lytton, First Baron Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton
HAS INSTANCE=> Mailer, Norman Mailer
HAS INSTANCE=> Malamud, Bernard Malamud
HAS INSTANCE=> Malory, Thomas Malory, Sir Thomas Malory
HAS INSTANCE=> Malraux, Andre Malraux
HAS INSTANCE=> Mann, Thomas Mann
HAS INSTANCE=> Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
HAS INSTANCE=> Manzoni, Alessandro Manzoni
HAS INSTANCE=> Marquand, John Marquand, John Philip Marquand
HAS INSTANCE=> Marsh, Ngaio Marsh
HAS INSTANCE=> Mason, A. E. W. Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley Mason
HAS INSTANCE=> Maugham, Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, William Somerset Maugham
HAS INSTANCE=> Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant, Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant
HAS INSTANCE=> Mauriac, Francois Mauriac, Francois Charles Mauriac
HAS INSTANCE=> Maurois, Andre Maurois, Emile Herzog
HAS INSTANCE=> McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Mary Therese McCarthy
HAS INSTANCE=> McCullers, Carson McCullers, Carson Smith McCullers
HAS INSTANCE=> McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marshall McLuhan
HAS INSTANCE=> Melville, Herman Melville
HAS INSTANCE=> Merton, Thomas Merton
HAS INSTANCE=> Michener, James Michener, James Albert Michener
HAS INSTANCE=> Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Valentine Miller
HAS INSTANCE=> Milne, A. A. Milne, Alan Alexander Milne
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Nancy Freeman Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Jessica Mitford, Jessica Lucy Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Montaigne, Michel Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Montaigne
HAS INSTANCE=> Montgomery, L. M. Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery
HAS INSTANCE=> More, Thomas More, Sir Thomas More
HAS INSTANCE=> Morrison, Toni Morrison, Chloe Anthony Wofford
HAS INSTANCE=> Munro, H. H. Munro, Hector Hugh Munro, Saki
HAS INSTANCE=> Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
HAS INSTANCE=> Musset, Alfred de Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
HAS INSTANCE=> Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir vladimirovich Nabokov
HAS INSTANCE=> Nash, Ogden Nash
HAS INSTANCE=> Nicolson, Harold Nicolson, Sir Harold George Nicolson
HAS INSTANCE=> Norris, Frank Norris, Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Oates, Joyce Carol Oates
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Brien, Edna O'Brien
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Flaherty, Liam O'Flaherty
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Hara, John Henry O'Hara
HAS INSTANCE=> Ondaatje, Michael Ondaatje, Philip Michael Ondaatje
HAS INSTANCE=> Orczy, Baroness Emmusca Orczy
HAS INSTANCE=> Orwell, George Orwell, Eric Blair, Eric Arthur Blair
HAS INSTANCE=> Page, Thomas Nelson Page
HAS INSTANCE=> Parker, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Rothschild Parker
HAS INSTANCE=> Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
HAS INSTANCE=> Paton, Alan Paton, Alan Stewart Paton
HAS INSTANCE=> Percy, Walker Percy
HAS INSTANCE=> Petronius, Gaius Petronius, Petronius Arbiter
HAS INSTANCE=> Plath, Sylvia Plath
HAS INSTANCE=> Pliny, Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus
HAS INSTANCE=> Pliny, Pliny the Younger, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus
HAS INSTANCE=> Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
HAS INSTANCE=> Porter, William Sydney Porter, O. Henry
HAS INSTANCE=> Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
HAS INSTANCE=> Post, Emily Post, Emily Price Post
HAS INSTANCE=> Pound, Ezra Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, John Cowper Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Theodore Francis Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Llewelyn Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Pyle, Howard Pyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Pynchon, Thomas Pynchon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rand, Ayn Rand
HAS INSTANCE=> Richler, Mordecai Richler
HAS INSTANCE=> Roberts, Kenneth Roberts
HAS INSTANCE=> Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
HAS INSTANCE=> Roth, Philip Roth, Philip Milton Roth
HAS INSTANCE=> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
HAS INSTANCE=> Runyon, Damon Runyon, Alfred Damon Runyon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rushdie, Salman Rushdie, Ahmed Salman Rushdie
HAS INSTANCE=> Russell, George William Russell, A.E.
HAS INSTANCE=> Sade, de Sade, Comte Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, Marquis de Sade
HAS INSTANCE=> Salinger, J. D. Salinger, Jerome David Salinger
HAS INSTANCE=> Sand, George Sand, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant
HAS INSTANCE=> Sandburg, Carl Sandburg
HAS INSTANCE=> Saroyan, William Saroyan
HAS INSTANCE=> Sayers, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Leigh Sayers
HAS INSTANCE=> Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
HAS INSTANCE=> Scott, Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott
HAS INSTANCE=> Service, Robert William Service
HAS INSTANCE=> Shaw, G. B. Shaw, George Bernard Shaw
HAS INSTANCE=> Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley
HAS INSTANCE=> Shute, Nevil Shute, Nevil Shute Norway
HAS INSTANCE=> Simenon, Georges Simenon, Georges Joseph Christian Simenon
HAS INSTANCE=> Sinclair, Upton Sinclair, Upton Beall Sinclair
HAS INSTANCE=> Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer
HAS INSTANCE=> Smollett, Tobias Smollett, Tobias George Smollett
HAS INSTANCE=> Snow, C. P. Snow, Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of Leicester
HAS INSTANCE=> Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
HAS INSTANCE=> Sontag, Susan Sontag
HAS INSTANCE=> Spark, Muriel Spark, Dame Muriel Spark, Muriel Sarah Spark
HAS INSTANCE=> Spillane, Mickey Spillane, Frank Morrison Spillane
HAS INSTANCE=> Stael, Madame de Stael, Baronne Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Steal-Holstein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steele, Sir Richrd Steele
HAS INSTANCE=> Stein, Gertrude Stein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steinbeck, John Steinbeck, John Ernst Steinbeck
HAS INSTANCE=> Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen
HAS INSTANCE=> Sterne, Laurence Sterne
HAS INSTANCE=> Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
HAS INSTANCE=> Stockton, Frank Stockton, Francis Richard Stockton
HAS INSTANCE=> Stoker, Bram Stoker, Abraham Stoker
HAS INSTANCE=> Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe
HAS INSTANCE=> Styron, William Styron
HAS INSTANCE=> Sue, Eugene Sue
HAS INSTANCE=> Symonds, John Addington Symonds
HAS INSTANCE=> Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Rabindranath Tagore
HAS INSTANCE=> Tarbell, Ida Tarbell, Ida M. Tarbell, Ida Minerva Tarbell
HAS INSTANCE=> Thackeray, William Makepeace Thackeray
HAS INSTANCE=> Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
HAS INSTANCE=> Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice de Tocqueville
HAS INSTANCE=> Toklas, Alice B. Toklas
HAS INSTANCE=> Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
HAS INSTANCE=> Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
HAS INSTANCE=> Trollope, Anthony Trollope
HAS INSTANCE=> Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
HAS INSTANCE=> Undset, Sigrid Undset
HAS INSTANCE=> Untermeyer, Louis Untermeyer
HAS INSTANCE=> Updike, John Updike, John Hoyer Updike
HAS INSTANCE=> Van Doren, Carl Van Doren, Carl Clinton Van Doren
HAS INSTANCE=> Vargas Llosa, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
HAS INSTANCE=> Verne, Jules Verne
HAS INSTANCE=> Vidal, Gore Vidal, Eugene Luther Vidal
HAS INSTANCE=> Voltaire, Arouet, Francois-Marie Arouet
HAS INSTANCE=> Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut
HAS INSTANCE=> Wain, John Wain, John Barrington Wain
HAS INSTANCE=> Walker, Alice Walker, Alice Malsenior Walker
HAS INSTANCE=> Wallace, Edgar Wallace, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace
HAS INSTANCE=> Walpole, Horace Walpole, Horatio Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford
HAS INSTANCE=> Walton, Izaak Walton
HAS INSTANCE=> Ward, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Mary Augusta Arnold Ward
HAS INSTANCE=> Warren, Robert Penn Warren
HAS INSTANCE=> Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Arthur Saint John Waugh
HAS INSTANCE=> Webb, Beatrice Webb, Martha Beatrice Potter Webb
HAS INSTANCE=> Wells, H. G. Wells, Herbert George Wells
HAS INSTANCE=> Welty, Eudora Welty
HAS INSTANCE=> Werfel, Franz Werfel
HAS INSTANCE=> West, Rebecca West, Dame Rebecca West, Cicily Isabel Fairfield
HAS INSTANCE=> Wharton, Edith Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
HAS INSTANCE=> White, E. B. White, Elwyn Brooks White
HAS INSTANCE=> White, Patrick White, Patrick Victor Martindale White
HAS INSTANCE=> Wiesel, Elie Wiesel, Eliezer Wiesel
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilde, Oscar Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilder, Thornton Wilder, Thornton Niven Wilder
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilson, Sir Angus Wilson, Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson
HAS INSTANCE=> Wilson, Harriet Wilson
HAS INSTANCE=> Wister, Owen Wister
HAS INSTANCE=> Wodehouse, P. G. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
HAS INSTANCE=> Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Clayton Wolfe
HAS INSTANCE=> Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr.
HAS INSTANCE=> Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
HAS INSTANCE=> Wood, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ellen Price Wood
HAS INSTANCE=> Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
HAS INSTANCE=> Wouk, Herman Wouk
HAS INSTANCE=> Wright, Richard Wright
HAS INSTANCE=> Wright, Willard Huntington Wright, S. S. Van Dine
HAS INSTANCE=> Zangwill, Israel Zangwill
HAS INSTANCE=> Zweig, Stefan Zweig
--- Grep of noun aldous_huxley
aldous huxley