“"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked.
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”
page 4-5
The Doors of Perception (1954)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Aldous Huxley 290
English writer 1894–1963Related quotes

“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”
Source: Dubliners
“Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near have neither heat nor light.”
Act IV, scene ii.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)

"Platonic Justice", Ethics, April 1938. Translated by Glenn Negley from "Die platonische Gerechtigkeit," Kantstudien, 1933. (The author corrected the translation in 1957), published in What is Justice? (1957)

“It is long since I have known the sweets of leisure and repose; since I have known in fine, that indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing, and being nothing.”
Olim nescio quid sit otium quid quies, quid denique illud iners quidem, iucundum tamen nihil agere nihil esse.
Letter 9, 1.
Letters, Book VIII

On First Principles, Bk. 1, ch. 2; par. 11
On First Principles

Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 56
“Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But look'd too near have neither heat nor light.”
Act IV, scene 4. Compare Distance.
The White Devil (1612)