Aldous Huxley World Quotations

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.

In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

We can't allow science to undo its own good work.

Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.

Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.

I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

When the individual feels, the community reels.

The more stitches, the less riches.

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

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.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.

For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

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.

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions

And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

But every one belongs to every one else

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma.

The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.

The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

No social stability without individual stability.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

The lion will lay down with the lamb...but every morning they'll have to provide a new lamb. Maybe this world is another planet's hell.