Aldous Huxley cytaty

strona 8

„Ja tam wolę być nieszczęśliwy, niż pozostawać w stanie fałszywej, kłamliwej szczęśliwości, w jakiej tu się żyje.”

„Wzbudzać miłość jest oczywiście rzeczą przyjemną, ale miłość nie powinna być zbyt gwałtowna ani zbyt długotrwała. Mężczyźni stają się wówczas nudni.”

„Potrafię współczuć cudzym bólom, ale nie przyjemnościom. Jest coś dziwnie nudnego w szczęściu innych ludzi.”

„Zbrojenia, powszechne zadłużenie i zaplanowane wychodzenie wszystkiego z mody – oto trzy filary prosperity Zachodu.”

„Zaledwie jeden człowiek na milion potrafi myśleć tak, że przynosi to korzyść jemu i innym.”

„Każdego określa nie tylko to, co on sam mówi, lecz charakter ludzi, którzy mają podobny światopogląd.”

„Dla swego psa każdy jest Napoleonem. To powód nieustającej popularności psów.”

„Kiedy ludzie są wobec ciebie podejrzliwi, sam stajesz się podejrzliwy wobec nich.”

„Dopóki ludzie będą wielbić Cezarów i Napoleonów, dopóty będą się oni regularnie pojawiać i unieszczęśliwiać ludzkość.”

„Rozumie pan, to jest zakazane. Ponieważ jednak ja tutaj ustanawiam prawa, więc i ja mogę je łamać. Bezkarnie, panie Marks - dodał zwracając się do Bernarda - Czego pan, obawiam się, nie może czynić."

- Mustafa Mond, Nowy Wspaniały Świat”

„Rządzenie to sprawa stołka, nie kołka. Rządzi się przy pomocy mózgu i pośladków, nie pięści."
- Aldous Huxley "Nowy, wspaniały świat”

„Dzięki ci, Fordzie! Nie był ostatni. Trzy spośród dwunastu ustawionych wokół okrągłego stołu krzeseł były jeszcze nie zajęte. Wśliznął się na najbliższe z nich w miarę niepostrzeżenie i oto już gotów był marszczyć brwi na widok wchodzących spóźnialskich."
- Bernard Marks, "Nowy wspaniały świat" Aldous Huxley”

„Sto powtórzeń przez trzy noce tygodniowo w ciągu czterech lat, pomyślał Bernard Marks, fachowiec od hipnopedii. Sześćdziesiąt dwa tysiące czterysta powtórzeń przeradza się w jedna prawdę. Idioci!"
- Bernard Marks, "Nowy, wspaniały świat" Aldous Huxley”

„Na antypodach umysłu jesteśmy mniej lub bardziej wyzwoleni z języka, przebywamy poza systemem myślenia pojęciowego. W rezultacie nasza percepcja przedmiotów wizyjnych posiada całą świeżość, całą nagość intensywności doświadczenia, które nigdy nie było werbalizowane ani przekładane na martwą abstrakcję.”

„W miłości istnieje zawsze przymieszka nienawiści.”

„Tajemnica szczęścia i cnoty tkwi w tym, by lubić to, co musi się robić.”

„Wiara jest czymś zupełnie odmiennym od wierzeń.”

„Co należy zrobić po upadku? To, co robią dzieci: podnieść się.”

„Gdy jednostka czuje, wspólnota szwankuje.”

„Nigdy tak wielu nie było manipulowanych przez tak nielicznych.”

„Słowa są kanwą, na której oplatamy nasze słowa.”

„Śmierć to jedyna rzecz, której nie udało się nam całkowicie zwulgaryzować.”

„Czasem lepiej zbłądzić, niż zbyt nachalnie pytać o drogę.”

„Amerykanie są narodem, który zbudzić można jedynie 3-krotnym kopaniem w drzwi; ale potem już nie mogą zasnąć.”

„Często szuka się sensu życia przy pomocy bezsensownych metod.”

„Tylko jeszcze jedna niezbędna masakra kapitalistów albo komunistów lub faszystów, lub chrześcijan, lub heretyków, a już znajdziemy się w złotej przyszłości.”

„Kto umie czytać, posiadł klucz do wielkich czynów, do nieprzeczuwanych możliwości, do upajająco pięknego, udanego i sensownego życia.”

„A więc teraz – powiedział Will – proponuje pani uczynić ich nieszczęśliwymi, w nadziei, że to przywróci im wiarę w Boga. Zgadzam się, to jedna z metod nawracania.”

„Z historią jest jak z mięsnym pasztetem – nie należy się przyglądać, jak się go przyrządza.”

„W szczęściu zawsze znajdziesz kawałek domowych pantofli.”

„Jeżeli chce się żyć każdą nadarzającą się chwilą, trzeba umierać dla każdej innej chwili.”

„Cały kłopot z fikcją literacką polega na tym - rzekł John Rivers - że za dużo w niej sensu. W rzeczywistości nigdy nie ma sensu”

“Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lower passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.”

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” said Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

“At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?”

“The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.”

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

“One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.”

“Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?”

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

“The spark within is akin to the Divine Ground. By identifying ourselves with the first we can come to unitive knowledge of the second. These empirical facts of the spiritual life have been variously rationalized in terms of the theologies of the various religions. The Hindus categorically affirm that Thou art That — that the indwelling Atman is the same as Brahman. For orthodox Christianity there is not an identity between the spark and God. Union of the human spirit with God takes place — union so complete that the word deification is applied to it; but it is not the union of identical substances. According to Christian theology, the saint is “deified,” not because Atman is Brahman, but because God has assimilated the purified human spirit in to the divine substance by an act of grace. Islamic theology seems to make a similar distinction. The Sufi, Mansur, was executed for giving to the words “union” and “deification” the literal meaning which they bear in the Hindu tradition. For our present purposes, however, the significant fact is that these words are actually used by Christians and Mohammedans to describe the empirical facts of metaphysical realization by means of direct, super-rational intuition.”

“How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! … Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. … Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.”

“Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.”

“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.”

“Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”

“Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.”

“No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”

“Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, “nothing burns in hell but the self”). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.”

“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.”

“Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

“Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

“At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.”

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot 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.”

“The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. “We are not satisfied,” he read, “with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people’s idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours.” The Quaestor put down the book, … and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.”

“Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.”

“Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.”

“Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society”

“Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.”

“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”