Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.

Isn't there something in living dangerously?

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

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

One can't have something for nothing. 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.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] 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.

One touches and, in the act of touching, one's touched.

Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.

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.

Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.