01c. 1928 ADFor in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
02c. 1928 ADEvery individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
03c. 1928 ADIn real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or becoming compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
04c. 1928 ADEvery man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
05c. 1928 ADChronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
06c. 1928 ADAnd the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to go hand in hand. Intelligence and knowledge without charity or goodwill would perhaps be inhuman and goodwill or charity undirected by intelligence or knowledge would be either impotent or misguided, the two have to go together.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
07c. 1928 ADIn silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
08c. 1928 ADThe essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
09c. 1928 ADOne believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
10c. 1928 ADKaty 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1928 ADGood Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for a moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
12c. 1928 ADAs a lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you're a bore.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
13c. 1928 ADThere will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolutionAldous Huxley / quote ↗
14c. 1928 ADOnly the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
15c. 1928 ADSelf-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
16c. 1928 ADI mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
17c. 1928 ADthe fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
18c. 1928 ADA man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
19c. 1928 ADThe silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday's futility. DesireBecomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her handBrushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?Or is she pedestalled above the touchOf his desire? He wonders: dare he seekFrom her that little, that infinitely much?And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
20c. 1928 AD[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
21c. 1928 ADWe men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo...Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
22c. 1928 ADWherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
23c. 1928 ADEating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.Aldous Huxley / quote ↗
24c. 1928 ADI took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. 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 / quote ↗
