quotes from classic

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Give me Catholicism every time. Father Cheeryble with his thurible; Father Chatterjee with his liturgy. What fun they have with all their char...

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Nobody who has any kind of creative imagination can possibly be anything but disappointed with real life.... Of course, you could always argue...

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting i...

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

more quotes from Aldous Huxley

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?

more quotes from Aldous Huxley