#huxley

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#inspirational #island #metaphysical-beliefs #metaphysics #faith

One egg, one embryo, one adult - normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where one grew before. Progress. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#brave-new-world #new-adult

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld. ↗

— Charles Lyell

#cast #england #ever #had #huxley

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century. ↗

— Albert J. Nock

#as far as #century #far #held #huxley

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol." ... "There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality." ... "But they used to take morphia and cocaine." ... "Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178." ... "Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug." ... "Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant." ... "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." ... "Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology." ... "Stability was practically assured. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#happiness #huxley #society #stability #immortality

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#bible #brave-new-world #history #martyrs #old-testament

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#huxley #lenin #marx #mussolini #propaganda

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#huxley #inspirational #reality #inspirational

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#experience #god #huxley #wisdom #death

The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments. "Just to give you a general idea," hew would explain to them. For of course some soft of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#happiness #huxley #society #intelligence