Aldous Huxley God Quotes & Sayings

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God. — Aldous Huxley

He had discovered Time and Death and God. — Aldous Huxley

The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self"
self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling
come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate. — Aldous Huxley

If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage.. — Aldous Huxley

Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance. — Aldous Huxley

All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God. — Aldous Huxley

Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God. — Aldous Huxley

I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin. — Aldous Huxley

The more you know, the more you see — Aldous Huxley

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses. — Aldous Huxley

God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash - it makes one vomit. — Aldous Huxley

This is how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have added, "These are the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God. — Aldous Huxley

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength. — Aldous Huxley

Drinking can not be sacramentalised except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. — Aldous Huxley

The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it. — Aldous Huxley

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation. — Aldous Huxley

God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. — Aldous Huxley

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words
people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history
sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. — Aldous Huxley

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone
quite alone, in the night, thinking about death. — Aldous Huxley

The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself. — Aldous Huxley

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it. — Aldous Huxley

God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. — Aldous Huxley

He had decided to live there because the view was so beautiful, because, from his vantage point, he seemed to be looking out onto the incarnation of a divine being. But who was he to be pampered with daily and hourly sight of loveliness? Who was he to be living in the visible presence of God? — Aldous Huxley

THE LIFE THEORETIC W hile I have been fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women. They have brazen faces like battering-rams. But I who think about books and such - I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling, And the women palsy me with fear. But when it comes to fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Why, there I am. But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it, Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows. — Aldous Huxley

Emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; — Aldous Huxley

The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil. — Aldous Huxley

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic. — Aldous Huxley

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God." (p.207) — Aldous Huxley

The doctrine that God can be incarnated in human form is found in most of the principal historic expositions of the Perennial Philosophy - in Hinduism, in Mahayana Buddhism, in Christianity and in the Mohammedanism of the Sufis, by whom the Prophet was equated with the eternal Logos. When goodness grows weak, When evil increases, I make myself a body. In every age I come back To deliver the holy, To destroy the sin of the sinner, To establish righteousness. He who knows the nature Of my task and my holy birth Is not reborn When he leaves this body; He comes to Me. Flying from fear, From lust and anger, He hides in Me, His refuge and safety. Burnt clean in the blaze of my being, In Me many find home. Bhagavad Gita — Aldous Huxley

But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?' asked the Savage indignantly.
'Why don't you give them these books about God?'
'For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.'
'But God doesn't change.'
'Men do, though.'
'What difference does that make?'
All the difference in the world,' said Mustapha Mond. — Aldous Huxley

God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called "human grace." Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of this. — Eric Weiner

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves. — Aldous Huxley

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap. — Aldous Huxley

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. — Aldous Huxley

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't change"
"Men do though — Aldous Huxley

He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ...
He had discovered the Time and Death and God. — Aldous Huxley

The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. — Aldous Huxley

"Our kingdom go" is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is self, the less there is of God. The divine eternal fulness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing, and acting. — Aldous Huxley

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone - quite alone, in the night, thinking about death ... " "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it. — Aldous Huxley

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. — Aldous Huxley

Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims. — Aldous Huxley

No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. — Aldous Huxley

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground - the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to "Die to self" and so make room, as it were, for God. — Aldous Huxley

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God. — Aldous Huxley

Then you think there is no God?"
"No, I think there quite probably is one."
"Then why? ... "
Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now ... "
"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.
"Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all. — Aldous Huxley

But God doesn't change.'
'Men do, though.'
'What difference does that make?'
'All the difference in the world. — Aldous Huxley

For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small. — Aldous Huxley

As if any one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.'
'But all the same,' insisted the Savage, 'it is natural to believe in God when you're alone - quite alone, in the night, thinking about death ... '
'But people are never alone now,' said Mustapha Mond. 'We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them to ever to have it. — Aldous Huxley

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. — Aldous Huxley

Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man
a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. — Aldous Huxley

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels. — Aldous Huxley

But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy. — Aldous Huxley

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. — Aldous Huxley

(A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, "Here am I." The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.) Was it not I who summoned thee to my service? Was it not I who made thee busy with my name? Thy calling "Allah!"was my "Here am I." Jalal-uddin Rumi — Aldous Huxley

But men are not content merely desire; they like to have a logical or pseudo-logical justification for their desires; they like to believe that when they want something, it is not merely for their own personal advantage, but that their desires are dictated by pure reason, by nature, by God Himself. — Aldous Huxley

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God. — Aldous Huxley

God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty. — Aldous Huxley