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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/272721.The_Doors_of_Perception_and_Heaven_and_Hell?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1173317357m/272721.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/272721.The_Doors_of_Perception_and_Heaven_and_Hell?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3487.Aldous_Huxley">Aldous Huxley</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/10550036?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>Read online here. A friend told me to read this, I think in my rant against drug use, lol. This book was popular in the 1970s, and argues that we need to find a safe drug that will allow everyone to escape reality without damaging our bodies. Some fun quotations here.<br/><br/>"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."<br/><br/>"The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling."<br/><br/>"Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten."<br/><br/>"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift."<br/><br/>""This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers...."<br/><br/>"That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul."<br/><br/>"The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. "<br/><br/>"We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible."<br/><br/>"Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be." <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/68030?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>