Quote

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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
Rise
Level
Levels
Words
Sunk
Language
Brutes
Often
Demons
Able
Demon
Thanks

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

Image
All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city they merely inhabit it.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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.
Aldous Huxley
Image
I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside they're on the premises, all the time.
Aldous Huxley
Image
If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The silent bear no witness against themselves.
Aldous Huxley
Image
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Aldous Huxley
Image
But then people don't read literature in order to understand they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I - cared to look at.
Aldous Huxley
Image
If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.
Aldous Huxley
Image
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Aldous Huxley
Image
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone.
Aldous Huxley