Source: La volgarità in letteratura
Aldous Huxley:
290
quotes
34
likes
Aldous Huxley Quotes
The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There (2006) by Kevin A Fabiano, p. 179
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
Source: Complete Essays 1, 1920-25
Variant: 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.
Source: Brave New World
describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22-24
The Doors of Perception (1954)
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Context: Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. 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. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. 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. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 11 (p. 104)
“Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma.”
Source: Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited
“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”
Source: Brave New World
Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The Controller, Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16
Source: Brave New World (1932)
“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”
Variant: You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
Source: Brave New World (1932), Ch. 3<!-- p. 50 -->
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Source: Brave New World
“Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.”
Source: Brave New World
Source: The Doors of Perception
“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”
Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 17
Context: Ever since his mother’s second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies. It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures. He was taking his revenge on her... He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God. He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence.... it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong. But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness. Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
“… one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”
Source: Crome Yellow
Aldous Huxley
book
Island
Source: Island (1962)
“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”
Source: Point Counter Point
“That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do.”
Source: Brave New World
