Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

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.

A gramme is always better than a damn.

For now there is only the darkness expanding and deepening, deepening into light; there is only this final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this illumination . . .

Most vices… demand considerable self-sacrifice. There is no greater mistake than to suppose the vicious life is the life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful—if strenuously led—as Christian's in Pilgrims Progress.

nationalism will always produce at least one war each generation. It has done in the past, and I suppose we can rely on it to do the same in the future.

Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I've always done, and yet wallow in sloth; be industrious about one's job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn't the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job---personal relations, in my case---is disagreeable and laborious.

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance. "Though you probably don't know what those are," said Mustapha Mond. They shook their heads. Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy. "But every one belongs to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.

The truth is paradoxical; but man's passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth.

Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma. Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years' War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany. "If

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

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.

And I'm not a poet: but never despair! I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

As a victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments what we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

What fun would it be if one didn't have to think about happiness

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.

A felicidade nunca é graciosa. Happiness is never gracious.

Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will? Chuang Tzu

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.

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?

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

You cannot have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.