Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.
aldous Huxleyquotes
1894 - 1963
Born to a prominent intellectual English family in 1894, it seemed Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was destined to become a scientist. Instead, when a serious illness left him nearly blind, he abandoned his scientific dreams to pursue a literary career. Graduating from Balliol College, Oxford in 1916 with a degree in English Literature, Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, The Burning Wheel.
Huxley hobnobbed with some of the most famous writers of the 20th century at Garsington Manor, a gathering place for intellectuals like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence. These experiences gave Huxley the substance for his early, satirical novels on contemporary intellectual society (Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point). At the same time, he was writing witty periodicals for Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Known for his far-reaching intelligence in his most famous novels like Brave New World and Island, which considered the positive and negative impacts of science and technology on society, Huxley was a successful screenwriter as well (Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Madam Curie).
When he moved to California in the 1930s, he developed an interest in Eastern mysticism and philosophy, which he believed was an alternative to the emptiness of contemporary society (The Perennial Philosophy).
Always writing, Huxley even documented his experiences with the drug mescaline in The Doors of Perception, and wrote a moving autobiography, This Timeless Moment, about his second wife. His lively mind and elegant style defined him as one of the most profound thinkers of his generation, and the most representative writer of his century.
God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
The first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”
achievement / end / Life / Thought
Good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatico – how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in calling a spade by some other name! – but good. You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her… And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?
He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. Bus his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabels were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defenses this morning.
True, Clara’s eyebrows didn’t meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large… And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them.
An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley’s can write Prometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity.