Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Dream in a pragmatic way.

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

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

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

life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

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

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…

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy.

Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.

The more stitches, the less riches.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time. "But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said. "No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed. "So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensating to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship