Aldous Huxley quotes - page 6

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise. (Aldous Huxley)
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences. View quote
Aldous Huxley
But every one belongs to every one else. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
One can't have something for nothing. 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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example... View quote
Aldous Huxley
I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell. (Aldous Huxley)
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma. View quote
Aldous Huxley
They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley
... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. View quote
Aldous Huxley
... we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy. (Aldous Huxley)
You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many be corrupted. View quote
Aldous Huxley
I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. View quote
Aldous Huxley
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. View quote
Aldous Huxley