Aldous Huxley: Words form the thread on which we string our experience...

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

Aldous Huxley

prophet next literature

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Aldous Huxley

hurt writing thinking

For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.

Aldous Huxley

buddhism atheism world

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Aldous Huxley

office sea country

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Aldous Huxley

huxley literature ideas

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been.

Aldous Huxley

light knowing silly

Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.

Aldous Huxley

contemplation action may

And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.

Aldous Huxley

cat voice children

Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.

Aldous Huxley

significant training experience

To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

Aldous Huxley

sublime half world

The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

Aldous Huxley

zippers philosophy believe

To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in the their advance towards man's final end.

Aldous Huxley

real philosophy mean

And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

Aldous Huxley

space answers watches

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

temptation prayer long

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

Aldous Huxley

only-time ghost names

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

should-have people thinking

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions

Aldous Huxley

self action world

Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Aldous Huxley

positive happiness funny

Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.

Aldous Huxley

eternal infinite perfection

...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

Aldous Huxley

rocks home fall

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.