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Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Quotes

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Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes

“From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.”

MeanDoeArtRealityDealsClassStudyExampleAspectPsychologicalInternalsConventionsTotality
Book:Collected Works: Do what you will
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“The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.”

HumansArtEndsSelfPhilosophyFactsLastsHuman BeingsExistencePrinciplesEternalAbsolutesFormulasBrahmanAtmanSanskrit
Book:The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West
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“Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.”

ArtRealityArtistChoicesLiteratureSocialWealthDealsConditionsTalentPositionPagesOrdinaryPsychologicalRealismExceptionalImaginativeFreedom Of Choice
Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley
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“The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.”

LooksArtWholeStoriesProblemEyeArtistUniverseBehindsObjectsProducePerceptionWindowSmellSignificantFamiliarSpotsArtisticKitchenCosmosDucksGlimpseSpiralsImplicitVistasSt Francis Of Assisi
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.”

GivingMeanArtBookRealFeelingsYoungArtistGirlPerfectFiguresPureLettersExcitingBreathsBillsBoredomSensationsVolumePornographyFatigueRecollectionRaptureUnansweredBad Breath
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!”

ThinkingGivingArtRealityArtistConditionsPreparedCrowdsRealismDirtBe PreparedIdealismRetreatBeardMosesBourgeoisTrumpetsCurlsHygieneMicrobesBedfellowsVerdi
Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley
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“The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”

IfsThinkingKnowsFeelsLittlesArtReasonArtistWorks Of ArtFinest
Book:Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization
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“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone.”

WorldMindArtValuesHoursAnimalPerceptionOrdinaryNotionObsessedTimelessInner WorldRuts
Book:Complete Essays: 1939-1956
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“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”

KindArtSelfCharacterFormActorsProcessActingPracticePlayerEmotionalPersonalityHabitExerciseArt IsAbuseSakeProfessionDramaticAffectedExploitsMasturbationExhibitionsCatharticHypnoticPower Over OthersActing From Actors
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.”

IfsWayHumansArtInspirationPoetrySpeakFeltBornLinesHuman BeingsSpaceWhiteQualityGraceDivinePoetCapableCapacityRemainsVersesPersistSelflessnessArrangingPrecious GiftsBetween The LinesWhite Space
Author:Aldous Huxley
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