Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

These," he said gravely, "are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.

We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

[...]But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.

He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. . .
He had discovered the Time and Death and God.

And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.

Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.

...science has "explained" nothing; ...the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness....

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind.

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

Grace is the first mouthful of each course - chewed and chewed until there's nothing left of it. And all the time you're chewing you pay attention to the flavour of the food, to it's consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.