Nicholas Murray > Quotes

“[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“Selfhood is a heavy, hardly translucent medium, which cuts off most of the light of reality and distorts what little it permits to pass.' This is Huxley's central notion [of Grey Eminence], that we should 'stand out of our own light' in order to see the eternal truths.”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“Why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be - and what one's own writing is not. Aldous Huxley”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“Huxley believed tat anyone "with a gift for the knowledge of ultimate reality" could do far more good "by sticking to his curious activities on the margin of society than by going to the centre and trying to improve matters there.”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“Huxley believed that anyone "with a gift for the knowledge of ultimate reality" could do far more good "by sticking to his curious activities on the margin of society than by going to the centre and trying to improve matters there.”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“... one is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one's appetites, which have grown feebler, and by one's passions, which seems such a bore - all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows. - Aldous Huxley”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“...one is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one's appetites, which have grown feeble, and by one's passions, which seem such a bore - all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows. - Aldous Huxley”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“...we have been content to drivel along with our current educational systems, most of which neglect all the essential things and leave their victims for all intents and purposes quite untrained. - Aldous Huxley, 1934”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography

“[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation [sic] which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.”
― Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography