Aldous Huxley
British novelist and essayist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the 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 bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
—Aldous Huxley, British novelist and essayist, The Doors of Perception, 1954
Posted on December 2, 2005 at 10:55 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Facts are ventriloquists' 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.
—Aldous Huxley, British novelist and essayist, Time Must Have a Stop, 1945
Posted on October 22, 2003 at 4:53 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
—Aldous Huxley, British novelist and essayist, Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956
Posted on October 19, 2000 at 6:36 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
—Aldous Huxley, British novelist and essayist, quoted in Speaking of Books, edited by Rob Kaplan and Harold Rabinowitz
Posted on December 11, 2000 at 11:29 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall mark of true science.
—Aldous Huxley, British novelist and essayist, Ends and Means, 1937
Posted on June 23, 1998 at 8:37 AM
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