Aldous Huxley:
333
citations
1
J'aime
Aldous Huxley citations célèbres
“Comme se serait amusant si l'on n'était pas obligé de songer au bonheur!”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Citations sur les hommes et les garçons de Aldous Huxley
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
L'évocation présentée par l'Administrateur était si vivante que l'un des jeunes gens, plus sensibles que les autres, fut pris de pâleur, rien qu'à la description, et fut sur le point d'avoir la nausée.
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Aldous Huxley Citations
“On croit en Dieu parce qu'on a été conditionné à croire en Dieu.”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Préface Nouvelle de l'auteur de 1946
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Tour du monde d'un sceptique, 1926
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Préface Nouvelle de l'auteur de 1946
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Aldous Huxley, Tour du monde d'un sceptique.
Tour du monde d'un sceptique, 1926
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
“Dieu n'est pas compatible avec les machines, la médecine scientifique, et le bonheur universel.”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
“J'aimerais mieux être malheureux que de connaître cette espèce de bonheur faux et menteur.”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
“On ne peut être indépendant de Dieu que pendant qu'on a la jeunesse et la prospérité.”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
“Ne remettez jamais à demain le plaisir que vous pouvez prendre aujourd'hui.”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
“Comme si la mort était quelque chose de terrible, comme si quiconque avait une telle importance!”
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Le Meilleur des mondes, 1932
Brave New World
Variante: Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur realisation définitive?. . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins “parfaite” et plus libre.
Aldous Huxley: Citations en anglais
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Source: Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16<!-- p. 228-->
Source: Brave New World (1932)
Contexte: I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
"John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Source: The Genius And The Goddess
“Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Source: Brave New World
Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270
Contexte: 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.
Aldous Huxley
livre
Point Counter Point
Variante: A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Source: Point Counter Point
“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
The Art of Seeing
Source: The Art of Seeing
“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Source: Brave New World
“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Source: Brave New World
Source: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 26; note: the character Mark Rampion, a writer, painter and fierce critic of modern society, is based on D. H. Lawrence.
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Contexte: 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.... The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions, just as in some ways the admirable man can have detestable opinions.... Many intellectuals, of course, don’t get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You’ve got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the nonintellectuals have always remained.... these nonintellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and... are preoccupied with making money... They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable.... The nonintellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings.... There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t of course the same as the obvious of the nonintellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.
“I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.”
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Source: Brave New World
Source: La volgarità in letteratura
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
Aldous Huxley
livre
Le Meilleur des mondes
Variante: 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
Contexte: 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.
