Aldous Huxley

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

“Quizá la más grande lección de la historia es que nadie aprendió las lecciones de la historia”

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

“It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose— well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.”

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”

“Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.”

“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.”

“Here and now, boys.”

“Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man--a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.”

“An irrelevance, and your life's altered.”

“The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.”

“A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.”

“I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.”

“What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well being.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

“The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy." ..."What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”

“Whatever is he saying?" said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer. The Savage violently started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five khaki twins, each with the stump of a long eclair in his right hand, and their identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a row, puggily goggling at him. They met his eyes and simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his eclair butt. "Is she dead?"he asked.”

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”

“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

“A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.”

“No social stability without individual stability.”

“The more stitches, the less riches.”

“Ending is better than mending.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”