Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-07-26 – 1963-11-22) was a British author, most famous for his novel Brave New World. He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and younger brother of Julian Huxley.
- See also: Brave New World
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Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying... Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. 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. 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.'- 'There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. ... All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head — round and round, continually What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night — not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep — the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits ... we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying ... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on ... There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die .... one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner.
- Antic Hay (1923)
- I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
- Those Barren Leaves (1925)
- What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.
- "Where are the Movies Moving?" in Essays Old and New (1926)
- Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Proper Studies (1927)
- That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
- Proper Studies (1927)
- The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
- Proper Studies (1927)
- Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
- Point Counter Point (1928)
- 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.
- Point Counter Point (1928)
- Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.
- "Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will (1929)
- The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now 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 things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. 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. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.
- Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5
- It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. ... Man is 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. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. 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, intelligent enough.
- Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270
- To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
- Readers Digest (1934)
- Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
- Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
- The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
- The Olive Tree (1936)
- So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
- Ends and Means (1937)
- Facts are ventriloquists' 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.
- "Bruno Rontini" in Time Must Have A Stop (1944)
- There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
- Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
- Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
- Essay "Distractions I" in Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Christopher Isherwood
- Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- "Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations (1950)
- 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.
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
- The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
- "John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
- 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.
- John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
- Liberty, as we all know, cannout 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.
- Brave New World Revisited (1958)
- That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
- "Case of Voluntary Ignorance in Collected Essays (1959)
- All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
- Vijaya in Island (1962)
- One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!
- Island (1962)
- 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.
- Island (1962)
- Words are good servants but bad masters.
- As quoted by Laura Huxley, in conversation with Alan Watts about her memoir This Timeless Moment (1968), in Pacifica Archives #BB2037 [sometime between 1968-1973])
- Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
- As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239
- 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.'
- As quoted in What About the Big Stuff?: Finding Strength and Moving Forward When the Stakes Are High (2002) by Richard Carlson, p. 293
- An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
- As quoted in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
- 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.
- The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There (2006) by Kevin A Fabiano, p. 179
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)
Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity. Experience teaches only the teachable…- After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
- "The Rest is Silence"
- For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
- "Sermons in Cats"
- 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.'
- "Sermons in Cats"
- Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
- Wanted, A New Pleasure
- 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.
- Wanted, A New Pleasure
- Experience teaches only the teachable…
- Tragedy and the Whole Truth
- Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity.
- "Meditations of the Moon"
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elpais.com
Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:03:53 GMT+00:00
El Pais.com (Espana) El filosofo Aldous Huxley , autor de Un mundo feliz, solia afirmar que convertirnos en seres humanos responsables, libres y conscientes es tan solo una ...
tv3.cat
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 PDT
La Silvia Soler ens parla d'aquest classic de la literatura, una distopia escrita per Aldous Huxley l'any 1932 que prediu com sera la vida ... tv3.cat.
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unknown
Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:00:00 GM
From John Milton and Oscar Wilde to Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith to Thomas Hardy and James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and . Aldous Huxley. to George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, Ian McEwan and Jeanette ...
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