“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley
“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.”
― Aldous Huxley
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley
“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.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley
“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley
“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley
“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
― Aldous Huxley
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley
“I am I, and I wish I weren’t.”
― Aldous Huxley
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley
“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley
“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley
“All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
“Every man’s memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. 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.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley
“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
― Aldous Huxley
“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”
― Aldous Huxley
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
― Huxley Aldous
“I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
― Aldous Huxley
“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”
― Aldous Huxley
“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”
― Aldous Huxley
“…reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays….”
― Aldous Huxley
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?”
“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The Savage nodded, frowning. “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 or 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.”
…”What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
― Aldous Huxley
“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
― Aldous Huxley
“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 sure, 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”
― Aldous Huxley
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
“There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”
“But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”
“Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.”
“Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”
“Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”
“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
“Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”
“Stability was practically assured.”― Aldous Huxley