Art Quotes by Aldous Huxley

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

— Aldous Huxley

When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

— Aldous Huxley

“You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.”

— Aldous Huxley

To be a fool at the right time is also an art.

— Aldous Huxley

“Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things.”

— Aldous Huxley

Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.

— Aldous Huxley

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

— Aldous Huxley

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as…

— Aldous Huxley

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in…

— Aldous Huxley

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think…

— Aldous Huxley

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

— Aldous Huxley

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully…

— Aldous Huxley

“As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms,…

— Aldous Huxley

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the…

— Aldous Huxley

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly…

— Aldous Huxley

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything?…

— Aldous Huxley

The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great…

— Aldous Huxley

The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal…

— Aldous Huxley

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty… Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting…

— Aldous Huxley

Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth… Dramabegins where there's freedom of…

— Aldous Huxley

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can…

— Aldous Huxley

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their…

— Aldous Huxley

The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object…

— Aldous Huxley

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.…

— Aldous Huxley

The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces…

— Aldous Huxley

There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and such eminent ones,…

— Aldous Huxley

“Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel—and you can't make tragedies without social…

— Aldous Huxley

“Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social…

— Aldous Huxley

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created…

— Aldous Huxley

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.

— Aldous Huxley

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation...

— Aldous Huxley

"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call…

— Aldous Huxley

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for…

— Aldous Huxley

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

— Aldous Huxley

People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.

— Aldous Huxley

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving…

— Aldous Huxley

“It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living…

— Aldous Huxley

We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then…

— Aldous Huxley

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations…

— Aldous Huxley

Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in…

— Aldous Huxley