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41 " Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? "
― Aldous Huxley , Antic Hay
42 " It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience. "
― Aldous Huxley , Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience
43 " Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything. "
― Aldous Huxley ,
44 " Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books. "
― Aldous Huxley , Brave New World
45 " With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me. "
― Aldous Huxley
46 " Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. "
47 " A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism. "
48 " That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. "
― Aldous Huxley , Collected Essays
49 " These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant. "
50 " But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind. "
― Aldous Huxley , After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
51 " My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. "
52 " Nature is powerless to put asunder. "
53 " Pain was a fascinating horror "
54 " After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. "
55 " To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. "
― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell
56 " Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived. "
57 " I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. "
58 " ...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.... "
59 " The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. "
― Aldous Huxley , The Devils of Loudun
60 " And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. 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. "