Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash-it makes one vomit.

Porque los detalles, como todos sabemos, conducen a la virtud y la felicidad, en tanto que las generalidades son intelectualmente males necesarios.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?

But why is it prohibited? asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else. The Controller shrugged his shoulders. Because it's old; that's the chief reason. We haven't any use for old things here. Even when they're beautiful? Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.

The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.

Simplicity is no virtue unless you are potentially complicated.

So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...

62,400 repetitions make one truth.

Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a month in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.

What fun it would be, he thought, if one didn't have to think about happiness!

But that was before I saw her coming down those stairs reincarnated as a goddess. A goddess in mourning. Those emblems of bereavement kept alive the pity, the religious adoration, the sense that my beloved was a spirit who must be worshiped in spirit. But out of the black bodice rose the luminous column of the neck; between the coils of honey-colored hair the face was transfigured by a kind of unearthly radiance.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.'' [...] To be a perfect animal and a perfect human - that was the ideal.

All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God.

That's why," he said speaking with averted face, "I wanted to do something first. I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn't absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

Thought is the brain's three milliards Of cells from the inside out. Billions of games of billiards Marked up as Faith and Doubt. My Faith, but their collisions; My logic, but their enzymes; Their pink epinephrin, my visions; Their white epinephrin, my crimes. Since I am the felt arrangement Of ten to the ninth times three, Each atom in its estrangement Must yet be prophetic of me.

It is not enough for the phrases to be good., what you make with them ought to be good too.

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in one's right mind.

Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers

Si l'on est différent, il est fatal qu'on soit seul.