Aldous Huxley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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. 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...”
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“Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.”
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“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
-- Aldous HuxleySource : Time Must Have a Stop (1945) ch. 7
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“The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“There 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.”
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“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
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“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”
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“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.”
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“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
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“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
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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.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”
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“So now you can let go, my darling...Let go...Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes...Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light.”
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“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
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“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”
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“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”
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“The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”
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“Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”
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“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
-- Aldous Huxley#Happiness Quotes #Pursuit Of Happiness Quotes #Conscious Quotes
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“Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”
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“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.”
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“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”
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“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
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“Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
-- Aldous Huxley -
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“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”
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“Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.”
-- Aldous Huxley
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