← Library

The Divine Within

Aldous Huxley

When evil is given free rein, either by individuals or by societies, it always ends by committing suicide. The nature of this suicide may be either physical or psychological. The evil individuals or societies may be literally killed off, or reduced to impotence through mere exhaustion; or else they may reach a condition, if the orgy of evil is too much prolonged, of such weariness and disgust that they find themselves forced, by a kind of sanguinary reductio ad absurdum, to surrender to the obvious truth that men are not gods, that they cannot control the destiny even of their own homemade world and that the only way to the peace, happiness, and freedom they so ardently desire is through the knowledge of and obedience to the laws of the greater, nonhuman cosmos. (View Highlight)

Dogma turns a man into an intellectual Procrustes. He goes about forcing things to become the signs of his word-patterns, when he ought to be adapting his word-patterns to become the signs of things. (View Highlight)

Beauty arises when the parts of a whole are related to one another and to the totality in a manner which we apprehend as orderly and significant. (View Highlight)

← back to Library