{"quotes":[{"text":"Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["helmholtz","huxley","poem","poetry"],"id":8361,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980).","author":"Mark Twain","tags":["adam","adam-and-eve","bible","charles-darwin","church","darwin","ernst-haeckel","evolution","genesis","germ","haeckel","herbert-spencer","huxley","religion","science","science-and-religion","spencer","t-h-huxley","thomas-henry-huxley","thomas-huxley"],"id":34264,"author_id":"Mark+Twain"},{"text":"There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["british-humor","humorous","huxley","word-meanings"],"id":35686,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why...' she hesitated.'Why one makes such a fuss about things,' Anthony suggested. 'All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self—just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course,' he went on, 'once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me,' he added, smiling.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["absurdism","absurdity","aldous","aldous-huxley","brave-new-world","existentialism","eyeless-in-gaza","huxley","nihilism"],"id":55757,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... Has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.","author":"David R. Stoddart","tags":["alfred-russel-wallace","bates","biology","charles-darwin","darwin","geography","h-w-bates","henry-bates","henry-walter-bates","hooker","huxley","impact","influence","joseph-dalton-hooker","joseph-hooker","russel-wallace","science","t-h-huxley","thomas-henry-huxley","thomas-huxley","wallace"],"id":75128,"author_id":"David+R.+Stoddart"},{"text":"It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision. In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.","author":"Dennis Gabor","tags":["aldous-huxley","brave-new-world","east","huxley","mysticism","nobel-laureate","the-island","wisdom"],"id":80649,"author_id":"Dennis+Gabor"},{"text":"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["huxley","intelligence","solitude"],"id":91821,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"For I am you and you are I.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["brave-new-world","huxley","song"],"id":92157,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.'...'There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.'...'But they used to take morphia and cocaine.'...'Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.'...'Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.'...'Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.'...'All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.'...'Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.'...'Stability was practically assured.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["drugs","happiness","huxley","society","stability"],"id":114366,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["huxley","inspirational","island","metaphysical-beliefs","metaphysics"],"id":191224,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}