Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxleywas an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in English literature...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 July 1894
sick civilisation
I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick.
black victim gray
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.
squares social holes
Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
positive ceilings
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
education book technology
Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
men significant-things house
Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
freedom taken liberty
Liberties are not given, they are taken.
religion vertebrates
God: a gaseous vertebrate.
flower blessed garden
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.
writing effort unsuccessful
he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
taste traveller written
For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.
prayer long temptation
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.
men brain spiders
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.
men infinite distraction
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.