Aldous Huxley Quotes

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

I'm not very good with words, weirdly.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

I have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast.

It's funny because I've made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Language is always burdened by thought.

I'm an intelligent man but I don't feel I articulate or get that across nearly enough, especially in social situations.

Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

This is why it is sometimes hard for introverts to find words: we really hate to compromise, and words are always a compromise.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

There were grammatical errors even in his silence.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.

I talk a lot. I express a lot of my feelings verbally.