Quote

... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Aldous Huxley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aldous Huxley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: July 26
Died: 1963
Died: November 22
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Godalming
Surrey
Aldous Leonard Huxley
Reads
Prevent
Oneself
Thinking

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

Image
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
Aldous Huxley
Image
All right then, said the Savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Civilization is sterilization.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Aldous Huxley
Image
I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The old idea that words possess magical powers is false but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Aldous Huxley
Image
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley
Image
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else
Aldous Huxley
Image
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The business of a seer is to see and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
Aldous Huxley
Image
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Aldous Huxley
Image
To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
Aldous Huxley
Image
I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self.
Aldous Huxley