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
lying thinking heaven
Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
heaven experience visionaries
I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.
mystical-experiences opposites heaven
Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individual experience.
enormous-quantities alcohol heaven
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.
arts cash heaven owes pay perish solid starving thank tribute
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
consistency consistent people
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
string thread words
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
mad shall truth
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad
absolute beings capacity english-novelist human infinite taking
Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
becomes except fantastic god learnt neither nor ourselves rational science simple terms thinks
We have learnt that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented; that God thinks in terms neither of Euclid nor of Riemann; that science has "explained" nothing; that the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
inspirational strong soul-and-body
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
history lessons men
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
doubt english-novelist man
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
certain corner english-novelist
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.