Aphorisms by Aldous Leonard Huxley

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large, this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers, back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

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.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently, though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know, for the time being, that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot be reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experiences they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as "true" and morally valuable. Every man tries to pretend that he is consistently one kind of person and does his best consistently to worship one kind of God. And this despite the fact that he experiences diversity and actually feels himself in contact with a variety of divinities.