But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifie… - Aldous Huxley

One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.

Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is." Istigkeit — wasn't that the word <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/73092.Meister_Eckhart" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Meister Eckhart">Meister Eckhart</a> liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy — except that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/879.Plato" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Plato">Plato</a> seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were — a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha.