Aldous Huxley Quotes

The only consistent people are the dead

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.

Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.

To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in the their advance towards man's final end.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . .

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization.

And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.

We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.

Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.

...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick.

I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion.

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.

Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.

I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method.

... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.