Quotes by "Aldous Huxley"

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’ ‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly. ‘Quite so…

It is the inactivity of self-will and ego-centred cleverness that makes possible the activity within the emptied and purified soul of the eternal Suchness. And when eternity is known in the heights within, it is also known in the fullness of experience, outside in the world.

Even the most ordinary experience of a thing or event in time can never be fully or adequately described in words. The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say 'blue' or 'pain,' in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning. God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order. To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa. Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect symbols. But to anyone who really wants to reach a given destination, a map is indispensably useful as indicating the direction in which the traveller should set out and the roads which he must take.

To the extent that there is attachment to 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' there is no attachment to, and therefore no unitive knowledge of, the divine Ground.