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That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Themes and Variations
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Happiness is a hard master -- particularly other people's happiness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Huxley and God: Essays
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Stories, Essays, and Poems
There are quiet places also in the mind.... But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Letters of Aldous Huxley
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Devils of Loudun
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Young Archimedes and Other Stories
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays: 1926-1929
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Crome Yellow
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means
No social stability without individual stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, "Amor Fati", Texts and Pretexts
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Olive Tree
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Imperialism is challenged from two sides. On the one hand, there is a rising tide of nationalism within the various empires, entailing demands for self-government and independence. On the other hand, there is an increasing realization that the whole idea of the exclusive empire belongs to an age that is past; and that the backward regions of the world, both in respect of economic development and cultural advance, should be regarded as a responsibility resting upon the international community as a whole.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, "Imperialism and Colonies", An Encyclopedia of Pacifism
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, "Pacifism and Philosophy"
Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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