Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Simboliai ir be spalv? atlieka savo darb?

Primitive man explored the pharmaceutical avenues of escape from the world with a truly astonishing thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered. Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilized descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him.

No deseamos cambios. Todo cambio constituye una amenaza para la estabilidad.

By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled.

The story of drug-taking constitutes one of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant chapters in the natural history of human beings. Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep and ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary phantasy.

I'm going to be sent to Iceland.

We now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of the catholic inquisitors exterminating the devotees of a personal and transcendent Satan.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens." They

One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.

Il fatto che gli uomini non imparino molto dalla storia è la lezione più importante che la storia ci insegna

Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues.

the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc'

for by introspection and by listening to other people's judgements of our character we ca all, if we so desire, come to a very shrewd understanding of our flaws and weaknesses and real, as opposed to the avowed and advertised, motives or our actions. If most of use remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

La felicidad siempre aparece escuálida en comparación con las compensaciones que ofrece la desdicha. Y, naturalmente, la estabilidad no es, ni con mucho, tan espectacular como la inestabilidad.

A beleza atrai, e nós não queremos que ninguém seja atraído pelas coisas antigas. Queremos que amem as novas.

Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily, with a soft undulating movement at the knees and hips.

The legs, for example, of that chair - how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes - or was it several centuries? - not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them - or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

I drank to the imminent of His Coming, he repeated, with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, as far as he was concerned, was horribly remote.

In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything.

El muchacho no había tenido mala intención. Lo cual, en cierta manera, empeoraba aún más las cosas. Los que le querían bien se comportaban lo mismo que los que le querían mal.

One can't have something for nothing.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.