Style of The Book
Huxley deliberately chose less well-known quotations, because "familiarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but ... a kind of reverential insensibility, ... an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words." So, for example, Chapter 5 on 'Charity' takes just one quotation from the Bible, combining it with less familiar sources:
- "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. 1 John iv"
- "By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never.The Cloud of Unknowing"
- "The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.Jalal-uddin Rumi"
Huxley then explains: "We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge..."
Huxley is quite vague with his references: "No specific sources are given."
Read more about this topic: The Perennial Philosophy
Famous quotes containing the words style and/or book:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.”
—William Styron (b. 1925)