How many times have you felt captivated by a cluster of words that spoke directly to your soul? Well, prepare to experience that feeling once again as we dive into the enigmatic world of “Provoking Aldous Huxley Quotes”. Aldous Huxley, a luminary of the literary world and the maestro behind the dystopian novel “Brave New World“, was not only a visionary but a man who held a mirror up to society, exploring its complexities through his profound and thought-provoking insights.
So, let's set the stage. Picture a young Aldous Huxley, blind in one eye due to an illness in his teens, turning this seeming setback into a golden opportunity to explore the world of literature and philosophy with an intensity that few could match. It was this resilient spirit and unique perspective on life that imbued his quotes with an inimitable depth and relevance. Today, we'll be unravelling 50 such Aldous Huxley Quotes that are as impactful today as they were when first penned down. These quotes are your ticket to journey into the depths of Huxley's mind, to explore his genius, and to spark introspection within your own thoughts. Get ready to be stirred, provoked, and deeply moved.
The Realm of Thought and Perception
1. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
2. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
3. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
4. “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
5. “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
6. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
7. “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
8. “Every man's memory is his private literature.”
9. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
10. “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
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Exploring Human Nature
- “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
- “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.”
- “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
- “Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
- “At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”
- “An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.”
- “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
- “The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
- “A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”
- “The only completely consistent people are dead.”
Insights on Society
- “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
- “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
- “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
- “Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.”
- “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
- “Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.”
- “The more we do, the more we can do; the busier we are, the more leisure we have.”
- “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
- “Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence.”
- “One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”
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Delving into Art and Literature
- “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”
- “The secret of storytelling is to know your ending, then backfill the rest.”
- “Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted.”
- “Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
- “A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”
- “Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”
- “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
- “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?”
- “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
- “To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”
Pondering Life and Beyond
- “The only completely consistent people are dead.”
- “I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
- “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.'”
- “Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty; eternal vigilance is the price of human decency.”
- “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”
- “It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.”
- “Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.”
- “We are all fools in love.”
- “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.”
- “It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.”
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