Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 12

• 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

  Believe, Games, Play

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Texts & pretexts: an anthology with commentaries”

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• 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

  Giving Up, Humility, Reality

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• 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

  Wise, Wisdom, Science

  1944 Time Must Have a Stop

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• Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love Is, Shelter, Unattainable

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• 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

  Forgiveness, Men, Self

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

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• An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

  Aldous Huxley

  Self, Personality, Scales

  Aldous Huxley (1993). “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel”, p.124, Ivan R. Dee

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• 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

  Real, Memorable, Omission

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• 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

  Love, People, Violent

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• 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

  Play, Age, Technique

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• 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

  Evil, Mind, Prohibition

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

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• 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

  Vision, Impossible, Kind

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

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• Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

  Aldous Huxley

  Form, Strings, Thread

  Aldous Huxley (1947). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• 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

  Jesus, Men, Names

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

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• 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

  Political, Important, Capacity

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

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• 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

  Book, Reading, Past

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

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• 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

  Fate, Soul, Literature

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

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

  Aldous Huxley

  Ideas, World, Obscure

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

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• 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

  Art, Thinking, Littles

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

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• 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

  Mean, Civilization, Class

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

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• The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

  Aldous Huxley

  People, Needs, Facts

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1930-1935”, Ivan R Dee

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• 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

  Past, Brave New World, Years

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Brave New World”, Spark Notes

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• 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

  Home, Ignorance, Journey

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• 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

  Imagination, World, Realizing

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

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• 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

  Mean, Attention, Pay

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

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• 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

  Blessed, Sleep, Blessing

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

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