Quotes from Aldous Huxley

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.

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. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

O brave new world that has such people in it.

Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.

we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.