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Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Quotes

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Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

MindLanguageInformationCommunicationHumanExperienceSymbolsConstraintsSemanticsSemiotics
Book:The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
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“Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad, ‘that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.’ According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.”

MindLanguagePerceptionHuxleyBergson
Book:The Doors of Perception
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“Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.”

IfsMenWayMindLongBodyPastMotivationSinMen And WomenPunishmentEvidentTormentVisionariesAsceticismSightseeingAntipodes
Book:Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948
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“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”

IfsMenMindHeartMaySoulDesireCuttingTravelHungerObstaclesMysticismStillnessThirstFunny TravelHeart And MindMysticCutting OffHunger And Thirst
Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley
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“A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.”

MindLittlesLongCountryWholeBodyNamesIndividualGivenNationsWishBornAliveIdentityEnglandDiedPopulationStrangerDisappearFranceTitlesCollectionsControlledPassagesAbstraction
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”

WorldMindDoeImportantMatterFactsProblemEyeOrderTermInterestExistenceOrdinaryConcernRelationDistancePatternsCeaseSignificanceCategoriesIntensityImpliedProfunditySpatial
Book:Complete Essays: 1939-1956
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“You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

MindEndsSufferingEasyTroubleSeaLike YouArmsFortuneArrowsOutrageousOpposingAbolishBrave New World HappinessBrave New World FreedomSlings And Arrows
Book:Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books
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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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“Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system”

MenMindHumansMadeAgeTodaySocialSinEconomicActivityHighestWeightImportanceOriginalsCoreShouldersHuman LifeManifestationDistractionOrganizePreyExploitsEconomic SystemsOriginal SinImbecilesOrigin Of LifeTitansIrrelevance
Book:Huxley and God: essays
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