Cody

“An artist's inspiration may be either a human or a spiritual grace, or a mixture of both. Hight artistic achievement is impossible without at least those forms of intellectual, emotional, or physical mortification appropriate to the kind of art which is being practiced.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

“From Lovelessness in relation to nature we to advance to lovelessness in relation to art –a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place.”
― Aldous Huxley , The Perennial Philosophy

“The Mortified are, in some respects, often much worse than the unmortified is a commonplace of history, fiction, and descriptive psychology. Thus, the Puritan may practice all the cardinal virtues –prudence, fortitude, temperance, and chastity –and yet remain a thoroughly bad man; for in all too many cases, these virtues of his are accompanied by and casually connected with the sins of pride, envy, chronic anger, and uncharitableness sometimes to the level of active cruelty. Mistaking the means for the end, the Puritan has fancied himself holy because he is stoically austere.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

“Of all social, moral, and spiritual problems that of power is the most chronically urgent and the most difficult of solution. Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently knows none of the limits by the tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance, and lust. Growing with ever successive satisfaction, the appetite for power and manifest itself indefinitely, without interruption by bodily fatigue or sickness. Moreover, the nature of society is such that the higher a man climbs in the political, economic or religious hierarchy, the greater his opportunities and resources for exercising power. But climbing that hierarchical ladder is ordinarily a slow process, and the ambitious rarely reach the top until they are advanced in life. The older he grows, the more chances does the power lover have for indulging in his besetting sin, more continuously is he subjected to temptations and more glamorous do those temptations become. In this respect is his situation his situation is profoundly different from that of the debauchee. The latter may never voluntarily leave his vices, but at least as he advances in years, he finds his vices leaving him; the former never leaves his vices nor is left by them.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy