Aldous Huxley

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Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Music
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But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Heart
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A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Busy
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One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Death
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You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Beautiful
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One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Cures
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Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Love
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The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Sacrifice
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The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Magic
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Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Lying
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A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Beautiful
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What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Artist
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Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Art
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A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Country
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Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Sky
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If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Sex
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Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Children
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All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Urbanization
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Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Beautiful
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The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Religious
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Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Black
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I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Here I Am
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Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Cat
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To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Judgment
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The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Philosophy
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People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Silly
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To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Inspiration
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I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Writing
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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.'
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Writing
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The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health. We cannot ask for more from any system; nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask for any less.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Giving
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Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Real
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There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Men
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To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Men
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Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Nature
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Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Holiday
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I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Morning
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To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in the their advance towards man's final end.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Real
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Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Art
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Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Girl
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Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Love
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The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord - a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Simple
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The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Art
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One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Character
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The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Brave New World
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Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Cities
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Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Real
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The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Christian
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The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Philosophy
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Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
- Aldous Huxley
Collection: Evil