Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Novelist, Essayist

Aldous Huxley was a British writer known for his novel 'Brave New World', which critiques societal control and the loss of individuality.

Men People Brave New World Art Thinking World
Born
July 26, 1894
Died
November 22, 1963
Quotes
679
Rank
#81

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Aldous Huxley quotes (page 7 of 34)

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"Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap."

Dirty Blessed Acceptance
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"That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep."

Blessed Sleep Blessing
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"The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously."

World Illusion
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"The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information."

Light Numbers People
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"And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is."

Past Brave New World Years
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""All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. "I claim them all," said the Savage at last."

Pain Cancer Long
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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."

Simple Keys Light
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"It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past."

Past Matter Remember
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"One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."

Cheating Patriotic Bully
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"But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock."

Life Church Compass
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"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."

Happiness Conscious Pursuit
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"We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability."

Want Menace Stability
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"No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife."

Cat Men Wife
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"The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object."

Art Eye Ducks
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