Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.

Can you say something about nothing?

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now But God doesn't change Men do though

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

I don't want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.