Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

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.

Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are — there we are in the Golden Future.

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.'
'A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,' said the Savage promptly.
'Quite so…

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

"That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded."

Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily...

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.

Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.

Cea mai gravă infracțiune a lui fusese să accepte lumea în care trăia ca pe una normală, rațională și corectă. Ca toți ceilalți, permisese publicității să îi multiplice dorințele; învățase să echivaleze fericirea cu posesiunile, iar prosperitatea cu banii cheltuiți la magazin.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

...'I am interested in everything,' interrupted Gumbril Junior.
'Which comes to the same thing,' said his father parenthetically, 'as being interested in nothing.