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The Alexander Technique Gives Us All Things We Have Been Looking For In A System Of Physical Education: Relief From Strain Due To Maladjustment, And Constant Improvement In Physical And Mental Health. We Cannot Ask For More From Any System; Nor, If We Seriously Desire To Alter Human Beings In A Desirable Direction, Can We Ask For Any Less.

-Aldous Huxley

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The Alexander Technique Gives

Aldous Huxley

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The Alexander Technique Gives Us All Things We Have Been Looking For In A System Of Physical Education: Relief From Strain Due To Maladjustment, And Constant Improvement In Physical And Mental Health. We Cannot Ask For More From Any System; Nor, If We Seriously Desire To Alter Human Beings In A Desirable Direction, Can We Ask For Any Less.

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In Spiritual Matters, Knowledge Is Dependent Upon Being; As We Are, So We Know.

Religion Is Always A Patron Of The Arts, But Its Taste Is By No Means Impeccable.

My Fate Cannot Be Mastered; It Can Only Be Collaborated With And Thereby, To Some Extent, Directed. Nor Am I The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

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

In A Word, They Failed To Take Into Account Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions.

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences. [therefore Be Careful How You Interpret Your Life. Don't Think Or Speak Negatively Lest Your Subconscious And Others Take You At Your Word And You Are Hung By Your Own Tongue!]

It Isn't A Matter Of Forgetting. What One Has To Learn Is How To Remember And Yet Be Free Of The Past.

Man Is So Intelligent That He Feels Impelled To Invent Theories To Account For What Happens In The World. Unfortunately, He Is Not Quite Intelligent Enough, In Most Cases, To Find Correct Explanations. So That When He Acts On His Theories, He Behaves Very Often Like A Lunatic.

I Was Not Looking Now At An Unusual Flower Arrangement. I Was Seeing What Adam Had Seen On The Morning Of His Creation - The Miracle, Moment By Moment, Of Naked Existence.

Proportion ... You Can't Help Thinking About It In These London Streets, Where It Doesn't Exist ... It's Like Listening To A Symphony Of Cats To Walk Along Them. Senseless Discords And A Horrible Disorder All The Way ... We Need No Barbarians From Outside; They're On The Premises, All The Time.

On No Account Brood Over Your Wrongdoing. Rolling In The Muck Is Not The Best Way Of Getting Clean.

Brave New World

It's Dark Because You Are Trying Too Hard. Lightly Child, Lightly. Learn To Do Everything Lightly. Yes, Feel Lightly Even Though You're Feeling Deeply. Just Lightly Let Things Happen And Lightly Cope With Them. So Throw Away Your Baggage And Go Forward. There Are Quicksands All About You, Sucking At Your Feet, Trying To Suck You Down Into Fear And Self-pity And Despair. That's Why You Must Walk So Lightly. Lightly My Darling.

Pleasure Cannot Be Shared; Like Pain, It Can Only Be Experienced Or Inflicted, And When We Give Pleasure To Our Lovers Or Bestow Charity Upon The Needy, We Do So, Not To Gratify The Object Of Our Benevolence, But Only Ourselves. For The Truth Is That We Are Kind For The Same Reason As We Are Cruel, In Order That We May Enhance The Sense Of Our Own Power.

The Humanity Of Men And Women Is Inversely Proportional To Their Numbers. A Crowd Is No More Human Than An Avalanche Or A Whirlwind. A Rabble Of Men And Women Stands Lower In The Scale Of Moral And Intellectual Being Than A Herd Of Swine Or Of Jackals.

Idealism Is The Noble Toga That Political Gentlemen Drape Over Their Will To Power.

I Don't Think There Is Any Incompatibility Between Science And Mysticism . . . Immanent Religion Is The Only Form Of Religion In Which There Is No Conflict At All, That I Can See, Between Science And Religion.

By Comparison With A Night-club, Churches Are Positively Gay.

We Can Only Love What We Know, And We Can Never Know Completely What We Do Not Love. Love Is A Mode Of Knowledge

I'm Afraid Of Losing My Obscurity. Genuineness Only Thrives In The Dark. Like Celery.

People Are Much Too Solemn About Things - I'm All For Sticking Pins Into Episcopal Behinds.

Books Have Their Destinies Like Men. And Their Fates, As Made By Generations Of Readers, Are Very Different From The Destinies Foreseen For Them By Their Authors. Gulliver's Travels, With A Minimum Of Expurgation, Has Become A Children's Book; A New Illustrated Edition Is Produced Every Christmas. That's What Comes Of Saying Profound Things About Humanity In Terms Of A Fairy Story.

Wild Inside; Raging, Writhing—yes, "writhing" Was The Word, Writhing With Desire. But Outwardly He Was Hopelessly Tame; Outwardly—baa, Baa, Baa.

For What We Think And Feel And Are Is To A Great Extent Determined By The State Of Our Ductless Glands And Our Viscera.

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.

Contemplation Is That Condition Of Alert Passivity, In Which The Soul Lays Itself Open To The Divine Ground Within And Without, The Immanent And Transcendent Godhead.

Music Is An Ocean, But The Repertory Is Hardly Even A Lake; It Is A Pond.

The Lion Will Lay Down With The Lamb...but Every Morning They'll Have To Provide A New Lamb. Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

A Man May Be A Pessimistic Determinist Before Lunch And An Optimistic Believer In The Will's Freedom After It.

If The Prince Of Peace Should Come To Earth, One Of The First Things He Would Do Would Be To Put Psychiatrists In Their Place.

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.

The Brotherhood Of Men Does Not Imply Their Equality. Families Have Their Fools And Their Men Of Genius, Their Black Sheep And Their Saints, Their Worldly Successes And Their Worldly Failures. A Man Should Treat His Brothers Lovingly And With Justice, According To The Deserts Of Each. But The Deserts Of Every Brother Are Not The Same.

Science Has Explained Nothing; The More We Know The More Fantastic The World Becomes And The Profounder The Surrounding Darkness.

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.

What A Gulf Between Impression And Expression! That’s Our Ironic Fate—to Have Shakespearean Feelings And (unless By Some Billion-to-one Chance We Happen To Be Shakespeare) To Talk About Them Like Automobile Salesmen Or Teen-agers Or College Professors. We Practice Alchemy In Reverse—touch Gold And It Turns Into Lead; Touch The Pure Lyrics Of Experience, And They Turn Into The Verbal Equivalents Of Tripe And Hogwash.

Family, Monogamy, Romance. Everywhere Exclusiveness, A Narrow Channelling Of Impulse And Energy.

Plasticene And Self-expression Will Not Solve The Problems Of Education. Nor Will Technology And Vocational Guidance; Nor The Classics And The Hundred Best Books.

Hug Me Till You Drug Me, Honey; Kiss Me Till I'm In A Coma.

Brave New World

If Only People Would Realize That Moral Principles Are Like Measles.... They Have To Be Caught. And Only The People Who've Got Them Can Pass On The Contagion.

And What Strange Voices They Have! Sometimes Like The Complaining Of Small Children; Sometimes Like The Noise Of Lambs.

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Societies Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted. The Luminous Ceiling Toward Which We Raise Our Longing Eyes Becomes, When We Have Climbed To The Next Floor, A Stretch Of Disregarded Linoleum Beneath Our Feet.

Within The Next Generation I Believe That The World's Leaders Will Discover That Infant Conditioning And Narco-hypnosis Are More Efficient, As Instruments Of Government, Than Clubs And Prisons, And That The Lust For Power Can Be Just As Completely Satisfied By Suggesting People Into Loving Their Servitude As By Flogging Them And Kicking Them Into Obedience.

There Are Few Who Would Not Rather Be Taken In Adultery Than In Provocation.

At This Point We Find Ourselves Confronted By A Very Disquieting Question: Do We Really Wish To Act Upon Our Knowledge?

You've Got To Be Hurt And Upset; Otherwise You Can't Think Of The Really Good, Penetrating, X-rayish Phrases.

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.

When Life Appears To Be Working Against You, When Your Luck Is Down, When The Supposedly Wrong People Show Up, Or When You Slip Up And Return To Old, Self-defeating Habits, Recognize The Signs That You're Out Of Harmony With Intention.

Those Who Meant Well Behaved In The Same Way As Those Who Meant Badly.

Knowledge Is An Affair Of Symbols And Is, All Too Often, A Hindrance To Wisdom, The Uncovering Of The Self From Moment To Moment

The People Who Kill And Torture And Tell Lies In The Name Of Their Sacred Causes, These Are Never The Publicans And The Sinners. No, They're The Virtuous, Respectable Men, Who Have The Finest Feelings, The Best Brains, The Noblest Ideals.

Compared With That Of Taoists And Far Eastern Buddhists, The Christian Attitude Toward Nature Has Been Curiously Insensitive And Often Downright Domineering And Violent. Taking Their Cue From An Unfortunate Remark In Genesis, Catholic Moralists Have Regarded Animals As Mere Things Which Men Do Right To Regard For Their Own Ends. . . .

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.

Knowledge Is Porportionate To Being... You Know In Virtue Of What You Are.

No Less Than War Or Statecraft, The History Of Economics Has Its Heroic Ages.

Wherever We Turn We Find That The Real Obstacles To Peace Are Human Will And Feeling, Human Convictions, Prejudices, Opinions. If We Want To Get Rid Of War We Must Get Rid First Of All Of Its Psychological Causes. Only When This Has Been Done Will The Rulers Of The Nations Even Desire To Get Rid Of The Economic And Political Causes.

Half At Least Of All Morality Is Negative And Consists In Keeping Out Of Mischief. The Lords Prayer Is Less Than 50 Words Long, And 6 Of Those Words Are Devoted To Asking God Not To Lead Us Into Temptation.

Feasts Must Be Solemn And Rare, Or Else They Cease To Be Feasts.

A Poor Degenerate From The Ape, Whose Hands Are Four, Whose Tail's A Limb, I Contemplate My Flaccid Shape And Know I May Not Rival Him Save With My Mind.

Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man; It Is What A Man Does With What Happens To Him. It Is A Gift For Dealing With The Accidents Of Existence, Not The Accidents Themselves.

A Mind That Has Come To The Stillness Of Wisdom Shall Know Being, Shall Know What It Is To Love. Love Is Neither Personal Nor Impersonal. Love Is Love, Not To Be Defined Or Described By The Mind As Exclusive Or Inclusive. Love Is Its Own Eternity; It Is The Real, The Supreme, The Immeasurable.

Actual Happiness Always Looks Pretty Squalid In Comparison With The Overcompensations For Misery. And, Of Course, Stability Isn't Nearly So Spectacular As Instability. And Being Contented Has None Of The Glamour Of A Good Fight Against Misfortune, None Of The Picturesqueness Of A Struggle With Temptation, Or A Fatal Overthrow By Passion Or Doubt. Happiness Is Never Grand.

That’s What The Human Brain Is There For—to Turn The Chaos Of Given Experience Into A Set Of Manageable Symbols. Sometimes The Symbols Correspond Fairly Closely To Some Of The Aspects Of The External Reality Behind Our Experience; Then You Have Science And Common Sense. Sometimes, On The Contrary, The Symbols Have Almost No Connection With External Reality; Then You Have Paranoia And Delirium. More Often There’s A Mixture, Part Realistic And Part Fantastic; That’s Religion.

No Social Stability Without Individual Stability.

Brave New World

Why Do You Love The Woman You're In Love With? Because She Is. And That, After All, Is God's Own Definition Of Himself; I Am That I Am. The Girl Is Who She Is. Some Of Her Isness Spills Over And Impregnates The Entire Universe. Objects And Events Cease To Be Mere Representations Of Classes And Become Their Own Uniqueness; Cease To Be Illustrations Of Verbal Abstractions And Become Fully Concrete. Then You Stop Being In Love, And The Universe Collapses, With An Almost Audible Squeak Of Derision, Into Its Normal Insignificance.

Procrustes In Modern Dress, The Nuclear Scientist Will Prepare The Bed On Which Mankind Must Lie; And If Mankind Doesn’t Fit—well, That Will Be Just Too Bad For Mankind. There Will Have To Be Some Stretching And A Bit Of Amputation—the Same Sort Of Stretching And Amputations As Have Been Going On Ever Since Applied Science Really Got Going Into Its Stride, Only This Time They Will Be A Good Deal More Drastic Than In The Past. These Far From Painless Operations Will Be Directed By Highly Centralized Totalitarian Governments.

Complete Prohibition Of All Chemical Mind Changers Can Be Decreed, But Cannot Be Enforced, And Tends To Create More Evils Than It Cures.

We Tend To Think And Feel In Terms Of The Art We Like; And If The Art We Like Is Bad Then Our Thinking And Feeling Will Be Bad. And If The Thinking And Feeling Of Most Of The Individuals Composing A Society Is Bad, Is Not That Society In Danger?

We Don't Want To Change. Every Change Is A Menace To Stability.

Finding Bad Reasons For What One Believes For Other Bad Reasons - That's Philosophy.

It Is Only When It Takes The Form Of Physical Addiction That Sex Is Evil. It Is Also Evil When It Manifests Itself As A Way Of Satisfying The Lust For Power Or The Climber's Craving For Position And Social Distinction.

We Are So Anxious To Achieve Some Particular End That We Never Pay Attention To The Psycho-physical Means Whereby That End Is To Be Gained. So Far As We Are Concerned, Any Old Means Is Good Enough. But The Nature Of The Universe Is Such That Ends Can Never Justify The Means. On The Contrary, The Means Always Determine The End.

To Talk About Religion Except In Terms Of Human Psychology Is An Irrelevance.

Sleep Is The Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces.

One Cubic Centimeter Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments.

A Squat Grey Building Of Only Thirty-four Stories. Over The Main Entrance The Words, Central London Hatchery And Conditioning Centre, And, In A Shield, The World State's Motto, Community, Identity, Stability.

Did You Eat Something That Didn't Agree With You?" Asked Bernard. The Savage Nodded "i Ate Civilization.

Parodies And Caricatures Are The Most Penetrating Of Criticisms.

If Human Beings Were Shown What They're Really Like, They'd Either Kill One Another As Vermin, Or Hang Themselves.

Happiness Has Got To Be Paid For. You're Paying For It, Mr. Watson–paying Because You Happen To Be Too Much Interested In Beauty. I Was Too Much Interested In Truth; I Paid Too.

Brave New World Happiness

Brave New World Freedom

Drinking Can Not Be Sacramentalised Except In Religions Which Set No Store On Decorum. The Worship Of Dionysos Or The Celtic God Of Beer Was A Loud And Disorderly Affair.

The Inconveniences And Horrors Of The Pox Are Perfectly Well Known To Every One; But Still The Disease Flourishes And Spreads. Several Million People Were Killed In A Recent War And Half The World Ruined; But We All Busily Go On In Courses That Make Another Event Of The Same Sort Inevitable. Experientia Docet? Experientia Doesn't.

When One Individual Comes Into Intimate Contact With Another, She—or He, Of Course, As The Case May Be—must Almost Inevitably Receive Or Inflict Suffering.

Where Beauty Is Worshipped For Beauty's Sake As A Goddess, Independent Of And Superior To Morality And Philosophy, The Most Horrible Putrefaction Is Apt To Set In. The Lives Of The Aesthetes Are The Far From Edifying Commentary On The Religion Of Beauty.

A Man May Have Strong Humanitarian And Democratic Principles, But If He Happens To Have Been Brought Up As A Bath-taking, Shirt-changing Lover Of Fresh Air, He Will Have To Overcome Certain Physical Repugnance Before He Can Bring Himself To Put Those Principles Into Practice.

War Is Often Described As A Law Of Nature-this Is Not True: Among The Lower Animals, War Is Unknown.

Man Must Learn To Simplify, But Not To The Point Of Falsification.

At Any Given Moment, Life Is Completely Senseless. But Viewed Over A Period, It Seems To Reveal Itself As An Organism Existing In Time, Having A Purpose, Trending In A Certain Direction.

Men Make Use Of Their Illnesses At Least As Much As They Are Made Use Of By Them.

God Isn't Compatible With Machinery And Scientific Medicine And Universal Happiness. You Must Make Your Choice. Our Civilization Has Chosen Machinery And Medicine And Happiness.

That We Are Not Much Sicker And Much Madder Than We Are Is Due Exclusively To That Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces, Sleep.

The Only Consistent People Are The Dead

I Had Motives For Not Wanting The World To Have Meaning; Consequently Assumed That It Had None, And Was Able Without Any Difficulty To Find Satisfying Reasons For This Assumption ... For Myself, As No Doubt, For Most Of My Contemporaries, The Philosophy Of Meaninglessness Was Essentially An Instrument Of Liberation. The Liberation We Desired Was Simultaneous Liberation From A Certain Political And Economic System, And Liberation From A Certain System Of Morality. We Objected To The Morality Because It Interfered With Our Sexual Freedom.

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

Medical Science Has Made Such Tremendous Progress That There Is Hardly A Healthy Human Left.

All The Advantages Of Christianity And Alcohol; None Of Their Defects.

Brave New World

Everybody Strains After Happiness, And The Result Is That Nobody's Happy.

It Is Only When We Have Renounced Our Preoccupation With "i," "me," "mine," That We Can Truly Possess The World In Which We Live. Everything, Provided That We Regard Nothing As Property. And Not Only Is Everything Ours; It Is Also Everybody Else's.

Consistency Is Contrary To Nature, Contrary To Life. The Only Completely Consistent People Are Dead.

There Isn't Any Formula Or Method. You Learn To Love By Loving - By Paying Attention And Doing What One Thereby Discovers Has To Be Done.

Man Has An Almost Infinite Capacity For Taking Things And People For Granted And Thereby Missing Out On The Pleasure Of Being Grateful That Things Aren't Worse And Of Praising And Thereby Lifting The Spirits Of Others.

This Really Revolutionary Revolution Is To Be Achieved, Not In The External World, But In The Souls And Flesh Of Human Beings.

Jehovah, Allah, The Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, Are Names For A Great Variety Of Human Virtues, Human Mystical Experiences, Human Remorses, Human Compensatory Fantasies, Human Terrors, Human Cruelties. If All Men Were Alike, All The World Would Worship The Same God.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism

But The Quiet Grows And Grows. Beautifully And Unbearably.

If You Don't Gamble, You'll Never Win.

But I Don't Want Comfort. I Want God, I Want Poetry, I Want Real Danger, I Want Freedom, I Want Goodness. I Want Sin.

Brave New World

I Think That Fiction And, As I Say, History And Biography Are Immensely Important, Not Only For Their Own Sake, Because They Provide A Picture Of Life Now And Of Life In The Past, But Also As Vehicles For The Expression Of General Philosophic Ideas, Religious Ideas, Social Ideas.

Dinted Dimpled Wimpled-his Mind Wandered Down Echoing Corridors Of Assonance And Alliteration Ever Further And Further From The Point. He Was Enamoured With The Beauty Of Words.

A Bad Book Is As Much Of A Labor To Write As A Good One, It Comes As Sincerely From The Author's Soul.

The Legs, For Example, Of That Chair--how Miraculous Their Tubularity, How Supernatural Their Polished Smoothness! I Spent Several Minutes--or Was It Several Centuries?--not Merely Gazing At Those Bamboo Legs, But Actually Being Them---or Rather Being Myself In Them; Or, To Be Still More Accurate (for "i" Was Not Involved In The Case, Nor In A Certain Sense Were "they") Being My Not-self In The Not-self Which Was The Chair.

I Have Discovered The Most Exciting, The Most Arduous Literary Form Of All, The Most Difficult To Master, The Most Pregnant In Curious Possibilities. I Mean The Advertisement. It Is Far Easier To Write Ten Passably Effective Sonnets, Good Enough To Take In The Not Too Inquiring Critic, Than One Effective Advertisement That Will Take In A Few Thousand Of The Uncritical Buying Public.

A Competent Portraitist Knows How To Imply The Profile In The Full Face.

Her Cheeks Were Flushed. She Caught Hold Of The Savage's Arm And Pressed It, Limp, Against Her Side. He Looked Down At Her For A Moment, Pale, Pained, Desiring, And Ashamed Of His Desire. He Was Not Worthy, Not... Their Eyes For A Moment Met. What Treasures Hers Promised! A Queen's Ransom Of Temperament. Hastily He Looked Away, Disengaged His Imprisoned Arm. He Was Obscurely Terrified Lest She Should Cease To Be Something He Could Feel Himself Unworthy Of.

The Most Valuable Of All Education Is The Ability To Make Yourself Do The Thing You Have To Do, When It Has To Be Done, Whether You Like It Or Not.

Procrastination

Did You Ever Feel, As Though You Had Something Inside You That Was Only Waiting For You To Give It A Chance To Come Out? Some Sort Of Extra Power That You Aren't Using - You Know, Like All The Water That Goes Down The Falls Instead Of Through The Turbines?

Brave New World

Armaments, Universal Debt, And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity. If War, Waste, And Moneylenders Were Abolished, You'd Collapse. And While You People Are Overconsuming The Rest Of The World Sinks More And More Deeply Into Chronic Disaster.

Facts Are Ventriloquist’s Dummies. Sitting On A Wise Man’s Knee They May Be Made To Utter Words Of Wisdom; Elsewhere, They Say Nothing, Or Talk Nonsense, Or Indulge In Sheer Diabolism.

Reality, No Matter How Utopian, Seems To Be Something People Need To Frequently Take A Holiday From.

Art Is One Of The Means Whereby Man Seeks To Redeem A Life Which Is Experienced As Chaotic, Senseless, And Largely Evil.

Consciousness Is Only Possible Through Change; Change Is Only Possible Through Movement.

I Used To Think I Had No Will To Power. Now I Perceive That I Vented It On Thoughts, Rather Than People. Conquering An Unknown Province Of Knowledge. Getting The Better Of A Problem. Forcing Ideas To Associate Or Come Apart. Bullying Recalcitrant Words To Assume A Certain Pattern. All The Fun Of Being A Dictator Without Any Risks And Responsibilities.

Societies Are Composed Of Individuals And Are Good Only Insofar As They Help Individuals To Realize Their Potentialities And To Lead A Happy And Creative Life.

Only Times And Places, Only Names And Ghosts.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

There Are So Many Intellectual And Moral Angels Battling For Rationalism, Good Citizenship, And Pure Spirituality; So Many And Such Eminent Ones, So Very Vocal And Authoritative! The Poor Devil In Man Needs All The Support And Advocacy He Can Get. The Artist Is His Natural Champion. When An Artist Deserts To The Side Of The Angels, It Is The Most Odious Of Treasons.

To Be Enlightened Is To Be Aware, Always, Of Total Reality In Its Immanent Otherness - To Be Aware Of It And Yet Remain In A Condition To Survive As An Animal. Our Goal Is To Discover That We Have Always Been Where We Ought To Be. Unhappily We Make The Task Exceedingly Difficult For Ourselves.

Seated Upon The Convex Mound Of One Vast Kidney, Jonah Prays And Sings His Canticles And Hymns, Making The Hollow Vault Resound God's Goodness And Mysterious Ways, Till The Great Fish Spouts Music As He Swims.

It Had The Taste Of An Apple Peeled With A Steel Knife. (sebastian Barnack Assessing A Roederer 1916 Champagne In Time Must Have A Stop)

When Truth Is Nothing But Truth, It's Unnatural, It's An Abstraction That Resembles Nothing In The Real World.

Children Are Nowhere Taught, In Any Systematic Way, To Distinguish True From False, Or Meaningful From Meaningless, Statements. Why Is This So? Because Their Elders, Even In The Democratic Countries, Do Not Want Them To Be Given This Kind Of Education.

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Dislike And Even Actually Dread All Notions With Which They Are Not Familiar... Hence It Comes About That At Their First Appearance Innovators Have Generally Been Persecuted, And Always Derided As Fools And Madmen.

In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody. The Essential Substance Of Every Thought And Feeling Remains Incommunicable, Locked Up In The Impenetrable Strong-room Of The Individual Soul And Body. Our Life Is A Sentence Of Perpetual Solitary Confinement.

I'd Rather Be Myself," He Said. "myself And Nasty. Not Somebody Else, However Jolly.

Brave New World Technology

A Child-like Man Is Not A Man Whose Development Has Been Arrested; On The Contrary, He Is A Man Who Has Given Himself A Chance Of Continuing To Develop Long After Most Adults Have Muffled Themselves In The Cocoon Of Middle-aged Habit And Convention.

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth.

Brave New World

And No Wonder; For The New Technique Of "subliminal Projection," As It Was Called, Was Intimately Associated With Mass Entertainment, And In The Life Of Civilized Human Beings Massed Entertainment Now Plays A Part Comparable To That Played In The Middle Ages Be Religion.

It Takes Two To Make A Murder. There Are Born Victims, Born To Have Their Throats Cut, As The Cut-throats Are Born To Be Hanged.

If One's Different, One's Bound To Be Lonely.

Home, Home -- A Few Small Rooms, Stiflingly Over-inhabited By A Man, By A Periodically Teeming Woman, By A Rabble Of Boys And Girls Of All Ages. No Air, No Space; An Understerilized Prison; Darkness, Disease, And Smells.

People Believe In God Because They've Been Conditioned To Believe In God.

Brave New World Character

Thought Of The Incomprehensible Sequence Of Changes And Chances That Make Up A Life, All The Beauties And Horrors And Absurdities Whose Conjunctions Create The Uninterpretable And Yet Divinely Significant Pattern Of Human Destiny.

Proverbs Are Always Platitudes Until You Have Personally Experienced The Truth Of Them.

I Have Spoken So Far Only Of The Blissful Visionary Experience? But Visionary Experience Is Not Always Blissful. It's Sometimes Terrible. There Is Hell As Well As Heaven.

There Are Confessable Agonies, Sufferings Of Which One Can Positively Be Proud. Of Bereavement, Of Parting, Of The Sense Of Sin And The Fear Of Death The Poets Have Eloquently Spoken. They Command The World's Sympathy. But There Are Also Discreditable Anguishes, No Less Excruciating Than The Others, But Of Which The Sufferer Dare Not, Cannot Speak. The Anguish Of Thwarted Desire, For Example.

Two Hours. One Hundred And Twenty Minutes. Anything Might Be Done In That Time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, He Had Had Hundreds Of Hours, And What Had He Done With Them? Wasted Them, Spilt The Precious Minutes As Though His Reservoir Were Inexhaustible.

Writers Write To Influence Their Readers, Their Preachers, Their Auditors, But Always, At Bottom, To Be More Themselves.

He Had Been Making An Unsuccessful Effort To Write Something About Nothing In Particular

If It Were Not For The Intellectual Snobs Who Pay - In Solid Cash - The Arts Would Perish With Their Starving Practitioners. Let Us Thank Heaven For Hypocrisy.

Such Prosperity As We Have Known It Up To The Present Is The Consequence Of Rapidly Spending The Planet's Irreplaceable Capital.

Liberties Are Not Given, They Are Taken.

Sons Have Always A Rebellious Wish To Be Disillusioned By That Which Charmed Their Fathers.

Experience Is Not What Happens To You; It's What You Do With What Happens To You.

The Artists Who The World Has Always Recognized As The Greatest Are Those With The Widest Sympathy. The Greatness Of The Great Artist Depends Precisely On The Width And The Intensity Of His Sympathy.

People Will Insist On Treating The Mons Veneris As Though It Were Mount Everest. Too Silly!

To Write Fiction, One Needs A Whole Series Of Inspirations About People In An Actual Environment, And Then A Whole Lot Of Work On The Basis Of Those Inspirations.

Medical Science Is Making Such Remarkable Progress That Soon None Of Us Will Be Well.

Medical Science

The Spiritual Journey Does Not Consist Of Arriving At A New Destination Where A Person Gains What He Did Not Have, Or Becomes What He Is Not. It Consists In The Dissipation Of One's Own Ignorance Concerning Oneself And Life, And The Gradual Growth Of That Understanding Which Begins The Spiritual Awakening. The Finding Of God Is A Coming To One?s Self.

Happiness Is Like Coke — Something You Get As A By-product In The Process Of Making Something Else.

There Are Many Kinds Of Gods. Therefore There Are Many Kinds Of Men.

People Will Come To Love Their Oppression, To Adore The Technologies That Undo Their Capacities To Think.

The Pursuit Of Truth Is Just A Polite Name For The Intellectual's Favorite Pastime Of Substituting Simple And Therefore False Abstractions For The Living Complexities Of Reality.

The More Powerful And Original A Mind, The More It Will Incline Towards The Religion Of Solitude.

I Have Always Found That Angels Have The Vanity To Speak Of Themselves As The Only Wise.

The Instinct Of Acquisitiveness Has More Perverts, I Believe, Than The Instinct Of Sex. At Any Rate, People Seem To Me Odder About Money Than About Even Their Amours.

Silence Is As Full Of Potential Wisdom And Wit As The Unshown Marble Of Great Sculpture. The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

A Majority Of Young People Seem To Develop Mental Arteriosclerosis Forty Years Before They Get The Physical Kind.

We Live Together, We Act On, And React To, One Another; But Always And In All Circumstances We Are By Ourselves. [...] By Its Very Nature Every Embodied Spirit Is Doomed To Suffer And Enjoy In Solitude. Sensations, Feelings, Insights, Fancies - All These Are Private And, Except Through Symbols And At Second Hand, Incommunicable.

I Wanted To Change The World. But I Have Found That The Only Thing One Can Be Sure Of Changing Is Oneself.

In Books, The Proportion Of Exceptional To Commonplace People Is High; In Reality, Very Low.

For In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody.

Actual Happiness Always Looks Pretty Squalid In Comparison With The Over-compensations For Misery.

Brave New World

Nobody Can Have The Consolations Of Religion Or Philosophy Unless He Has First Experienced Their Desolations.

One Right-thinking Man Thinks Like All Other Right-thinking Men Of His Time That Is To Say, In Most Cases, Like Some Wrong-thinking Man Of Another Time.

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Society Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted.

Which Is Better - To Be Born Stupid Into An Intelligent Society Or Intelligent Into An Insane One?

You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

Grace Is Always Sufficient, Provided We Are Ready To Cooperate With It.

Doing Your Best

In All Activities Of Life, The Secret Of Efficiency Lies In An Ability To Combine Two Seemingly Incompatible States: A State Of Maximum Activity And A State Of Maximum Relaxation.

Every Idol, However Exalted, Turns Out, In The Long Run, To Be A Moloch, Hungry For Human Sacrifice.

What Wonder, Then, If Human Beings In Their Search For The Divine Have Generally Preferred To Look Within!

One Of The Principal Functions Of A Friend Is To Suffer (in A Milder And Symbolic Form) The Punishments That We Should Like, But Are Unable, To Inflict Upon Our Enemies.

Brave New World

Fortunately, However, Birds Don't Understand Pep Talks. Not Even St. Francis'. Just Imagine, He Went On, Preaching Sermons To Perfectly Good Thrushes And Goldfinches And Chiff-chaffs! What Presumption! Why Couldn't He Have Kept His Mouth Shut And Let The Birds Preach To Him?

What Man Has Joined, Nature Is Powerless To Put Asunder.

Brave New World

Brave New World John

Your True Traveller Finds Boredom Rather Agreeable Than Painful. It Is The Symbol Of His Liberty - His Excessive Freedom. He Accepts His Boredom, When It Comes, Not Merely Philosophically, But Almost With Pleasure.

Faith, It Is Evident, May Be Relied On To Produce Sustained Action And, More Rarely, Sustained Contemplation.

The Religions Whose Theology Is Least Preoccupied With Events In Time And Most Concerned With Eternity, Have Been Consistently Less Violent And More Humane In Political Practice. Unlike Early Judaism, Christianity And Mohammedanism (all Obsessed With Time) Hinduism And Buddhism Have Never Been Persecuting Faiths, Have Preached Almost No Holy Wars And Have Refrained From That Proselytizing Religious Imperialism Which Has Gone Hand In Hand With Political And Economic Oppression Of Colored People.

Universal Education Has Created An Immense Class Of What I May Call The New Stupid, Hungering For Certainty Yet Unable To Find It In The Traditional Myths And Their Rationalizations.

We Are Not Our Own Any More Than What We Possess Is Our Own. We Did Not Make Ourselves, We Cannot Be Supreme Over Ourselves. We Are Not Our Own Masters.

Brave New World

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

In Actual Life A Downward Movement May Sometimes Be Made The Beginning Of An Ascent.

A Democracy Which Makes Or Even Effectively Prepares For Modern, Scientific War Must Necessarily Cease To Be Democratic. No Country Can Be Really Well Prepared For Modern War Unless It Is Governed By A Tyrant, At The Head Of A Highly Trained And Perfectly Obedient Bureaucracy.

Dream In A Pragmatic Way.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

So Now You Can Let Go, My Darling...let Go...let Go Of This Poor Old Body. You Don't Need It Anymore. Let It Fall Away From You. Leave It Lying There Like A Pile Of Worn-out Clothes...go On, My Darling, Go On Into The Light, Into The Peace, Into The Living Peace Of The Clear Light.

Drill And Uniforms Impose An Architecture On The Crowd. An Army's Beautiful. But That's Not All; It Panders To Lower Instincts Than The Aesthetic. The Spectacle Of Human Beings Reduced To Automatism Satisfies The Lust For Power. Looking At Mechanized Slaves, One Fancies Oneself A Master.

Art And Religion, Carnivals And Saturnalia, Dancing And Listening To Oratory - All These Have Served, In H. G. Wells's Phrase, As Doors In The Wall.

The Only Truly Consistent Are The Dead.

All That Is Needed Is Money And A Candidate Who Can Be Coached To Look Sincere. Political Principles And Plans For Specific Action Have Come To Lose Most Of Their Importance. The Personality Of The Candidate, The Way He Is Projected By The Advertising Experts, Are The Things That Really Matter.

... The Greater Part Of The Population Is Not Very Intelligent, Dreads Responsibility, And Desires Nothing Better Than To Be Told What To Do. Provided The Rulers Do Not Interfere With Its Material Comforts And Its Cherished Beliefs, It Is Perfectly Happy To Let Itself Be Ruled.

Dying Is Almost The Least Spiritual Of Our Acts, More Strictly Carnal Even Than The Act Of Love. There Are Death Agonies That Are Like The Strainings Of The Costive At Stool.

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Grover Norquist

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