Island Quotes

“We merely ask them," Mrs Narayan answered with a smile, "to attept the impossible. The children are told to translate their experience into words. As a piece of pure, unconceptualized givenness, what is this flower, this dissected frog, this planet at the other end of the telescope? What does it mean? What does it make you think, feel, imagine, remember? Try to put it down on paper. You won't succeed, of course; but try all the same. It'll help you to understand the difference between words and events, between knowing about things and being acquainted with them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“You'll have a better understanding of what was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done - what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what's what.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“En tanto que nosotros hemos preferido siempre adaptar nuestra economía y tecnología a los seres humanos, no nuestros seres humanos a la economía y tecnología de otros. Importamos lo que no podemos fabricar; pero fabricamos e importamos sólo lo que podemos permitirnos. Y lo que podemos permitirnos está limitado, no sólo por las libras, marcos y dólares que poseemos, sino también, y principalmente... principalmente por nuestro deseo de ser felices, nuestra ambición de ser humanos.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Los intelectuales de Occidente son todos aficionados a la silla. Por eso la mayoría de ustedes son tan repulsivamente malsanos.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Electricidad menos industria pesada más control de la natalidad es igual a democracia y abundancia. Electricidad más industria pesada menos control de la natalidad es igual a miseria, totalitarismo y guerra.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Nice comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The heart has its reasons,” said Will, “and the endocrines have theirs.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“There’s no single cure For what can never have a single cause.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Infinite suffering,” he whispered. “And you can’t speak, you can’t even cry out.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“he had been reborn as an unowned awareness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness! It’s all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“People may stand by while you’re suffering and dying; but they’re standing by in another world. In your world you’re absolutely alone.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand?”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“luckily no one’s immortal. The people who’ve been conditioned to swindling and bullying and bitterness will all be dead in a few years.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people—that there’s even a lot more to people than just people.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”
“Is that a matter of principle?”
“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself—and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached—and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ‘and I show you the ending of sorrow.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“. . . in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“. . . he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass ― but made up for it by being shortlived.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained - the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday's
Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;
Somewhere between
Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;
Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere
Between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all I had and long, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island