Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Proper Studies
What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means
One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Time Must Have a Stop
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts and Pretexts
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
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. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
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.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Collected Essays
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays
When the individual feels, the community reels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays
The flower of the present rosily blossomed.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Those Barren Leaves
What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Genius and the Goddess
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts & Pretexts
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Olive Tree
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World
