„Existuje jediný koutek ve vesmíru, který můžeš s jistotou zlepšit a to jsi ty sám.“
Varianta: Je tu jenom jeden kout vesmíru, který můžeš určitě vylepšovat a to je ten vlastní.
Aldous Leonard Huxley byl anglický spisovatel, který většinu svého dospělého života prožil v USA. Nejvíce proslul svými romány, nicméně psal též eseje, poezii, povídky, cestopisy a filmové scénáře a vymýšlel příběhy.
„Existuje jediný koutek ve vesmíru, který můžeš s jistotou zlepšit a to jsi ty sám.“
Varianta: Je tu jenom jeden kout vesmíru, který můžeš určitě vylepšovat a to je ten vlastní.
„Hodní a spořádaní lidé nemají ani potuchy o tom, jaký je svět ve skutečnosti.“
Konec civilizace, Ostrov
Rozhovor divocha a Mustafy Monda
Konec civilizace
Zdroj: Konec civilizace, kap. 17, str. 172
Širší citát:
"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.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
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,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered."
Zdroj: Island
Z rozhovoru divocha s Bernardem Marxem v rezervaci
Konec civilizace
Zdroj: Konec civilizace, kap. 8, str. 100
“Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.”
As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 239
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
Zdroj: Brave New World
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
Aldous Huxley, using the term "the doors of perception" which originated with William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It is sometimes credited to Morrison because he cited it in interviews as the inspiration for the name The Doors and without always crediting Huxley as the source.
Misattributed
Zdroj: " A Case of Voluntary Ignorance http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBooksWP/2013/11/a-case-of-voluntary-ignorance-by-aldous-huxley/" in Collected Essays (1959)
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
"Note on Dogma"
Proper Studies (1927)
Zdroj: Complete Essays 2, 1926-29
Island (1962)
Kontext: One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!
Antic Hay (1923)
Kontext: There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness. … All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head — round and round, continually What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night — not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep — the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits … we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows — a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying … For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on … There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die … one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner.
“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”
Zdroj: Island
“I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.”
Zdroj: Island
Zdroj: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 25
“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”
Zdroj: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (pp. 19-20)
“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.”
It appears in multiple anti-vaccination books, all by Trung Nguyen and a co-writer, circa 2018. In September 2021 it is echoed everywhere, including medical-journal articles (on various subjects), with no source given. Right above the Aldous Huxley "quote", these books quote a much earlier anti-vax author. Coincidentally, that author says (elsewhere in his book) this:
Let us admire all-powerful Nature, which is not so easily brought into this serious and lasting disorder by our perverse intrusions; for otherwise, there would hardly have remained a human being alive.
Misattributed
Zdroj: Christian Charles Schieferdecker, in Dr. C. G. G. Nittinger's EVILS OF VACCINATION https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dr_C_G_G_Nittinger_s_Evils_of_Vaccinatio/6CUaAAAAYAAJ, 1856, p.40
“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
"The Rest is Silence"
Zdroj: Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)
Varianta: I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.
Zdroj: Brave New World
“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
Zdroj: Brave New World
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
Attributed
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
The Controller, Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 17
Varianta: People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Zdroj: Brave New World (1932)
“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
Zdroj: Brave New World
Varianta: The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5
Varianta: Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Zdroj: Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries
Kontext: The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. 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. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.
Quoted as the opening passage of "BOOK ONE: The Functions of Language" in Language in Thought and Action (1949) by S. I. Hayakawa, p. 3
Words and Their Meanings (1940)
Kontext: A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.
This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. "A mere matter of words," we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.