Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Aldous HuxleyAmour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Aldous HuxleyThe more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous HuxleyPeople are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
Aldous HuxleyIf most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Aldous HuxleyIt’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.
Aldous HuxleyIt is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been.
Aldous HuxleyTo be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
Aldous HuxleyThe question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
Aldous HuxleyEvery significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.
Aldous HuxleyIn a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.
Aldous HuxleyWhat’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
Aldous HuxleyA large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous HuxleyWhat is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Aldous HuxleyThe old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Aldous HuxleyCynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Aldous HuxleyFortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?
Aldous Huxley...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Aldous HuxleyThere was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.
Aldous HuxleyIf one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
Aldous HuxleyAn ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.
Aldous HuxleyWords play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.
Aldous HuxleyWords can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Aldous HuxleyI know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.
Aldous HuxleyI was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous HuxleyDon't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.
Aldous HuxleyAll gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Aldous HuxleySomewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
Aldous HuxleyHuman beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
Aldous HuxleyOf the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.
Aldous HuxleyIt is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
Aldous HuxleyArt and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
Aldous HuxleyCraving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust
Aldous HuxleyAs political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
Aldous Huxley