Liz > Liz's Quotes

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“The fine point of seldom pleasure has been blunted”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley, Do what you will: Twelve essays

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“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

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― Aldous Huxley

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
― Aldous Huxley