Quotes from Aldous Huxley

I'd rather be myself,' he said. 'Myself and unhappy. Not somebody else, however cheerful.

The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Clear Light of the Void, and even from the lesser tempered lights in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of self-hood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated reality -- Anything!

?ovjek može biti stalno nasmiješen i biti nitkov.

Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair"—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen.

Entelektüel aç?dan ve çal??ma saatleri süresince yetiÅŸkiniz, duygu ve arzular söz konusu olduÄŸundaysa çocukça davran?yoruz.

Private. Not to be opened, was written in capital letters on the cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's preparatory school. Black is the raven, black is the rook, But blacker the thief who steals this book! It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been struck.

Todas las ventajas del cristianismo y del alcohol; y ninguno de sus inconvenientes.

As recently as a week ago, in the Director's office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. The Director's threats had actually elated him, made him feel larger than life.

Abban volt bölcs, hogy tudott hallgatni. A hallgatás úgy zárja magába a bölcsesség és szellemesség ígéretét, mint márványtömb a remekbe faragott szobrot. Aki hallgat, nem tanúskodik önmaga ellen.

Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don't select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It's like that poem of Wordsworth's, 'Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.' In

When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world.

the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

No se corre mucho riesgo apostando a que, dentro de veinte años, todos los países excesivamente poblados y poco desarrollados del mundo estarán bajo una u otra forma de gobierno totalitario, probablemente del Partido Comunista. ¿Cómo

La oscuridad se hizo más densa a nuestro alrededor y, de pronto, lo árboles se cerraron sobre nosotros y nos vimos sumergidos en la doble noche del bosque.

Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contended has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Free as a bird', we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded.

But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay. My good boy! The Director wheeled sharply round on him. Can't you see? Can't you SEE? He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability! Major instruments of social stability. Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of bokanovskified egg.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!

In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World... [Quote taken from Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell 21 October, 1949]

Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.