Aldous Huxley: Frasi in inglese (pagina 9)

“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.”

“O brave new world that has such people in it.”

“But every one belongs to every one else”

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

“Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”

“Isn't there something in living dangerously?”

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.”

“You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.”

“The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”

“In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.”

“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.”

“The proper study of mankind is books.”

“Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can’t escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they’re much less complex than the people one knows.”

“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

“The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. “What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?” ('“the Dharma-Body of the Buddha” is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, “The hedge at the bottom of the garden.” “And the man who realizes this truth,” the novice dubiously inquires, “what, may I ask, is he?””

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”

“There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.”