Quotes by Aldous Huxley
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
My fate cannot be mastered it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul I am only its noisiest passenger.
Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting i...
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Nobody who has any kind of creative imagination can possibly be anything but disappointed with real life.... Of course, you could always argue...
Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.
Give me Catholicism every time. Father Cheeryble with his thurible; Father Chatterjee with his liturgy. What fun they have with all their char...
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
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.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
