Aldous Huxley

“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”

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

“Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.”

“Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.”

“Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment.”

“The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No, we don't. And if that's his answer, then he won't have anything to do with any of the politicians. Because they all want to land us in hell.”

“What fun it would be if one didn't have to think about happiness!" - From Brave New World”

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”

“The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.”

“Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.”

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.”

“The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.”

“Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.”

“Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

“Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.”

“The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.”

“What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.”

“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, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.”

“Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks — already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”

“And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

“Embryos are like photograph film," said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. "They can only stand red light." And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer's afternoon.”

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

“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....”

“Resentment bred shame, and shame in its turn bred more resentment.”

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”

“It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.”

“Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might bedone in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds ofhours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt theprecious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.”

“When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”

“Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.”

“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”

“Wild inside; raging,writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. Butoutwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.”

“The only truly consistent are the dead.”

“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

“Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions — as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.”

“Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

“But every one belongs to every one else”

“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)”

“Consider the horse'They considered it.”

“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

“...civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist.”

“I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.”

“I fell,” he repeated for the hundredth time. “But you didn’t fall very far,” Mary Sarojini now said. “No, I didn’t fall very far,” he agreed. “So what’s all the fuss about?” the child inquired.”

“As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.”

“Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.”

“Pain's a delusion."Oh, is it?" said the Savage and, picking up a thick hzel switch, strode forward.The man from the The Fordian Science Monitor made a dash for his helicopter.”

“In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. When there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.”