Quotes from Aldous Huxley

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.

And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and your actual behaviour.

We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes

Chastity: The most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, 'Four years.' They said, 'How can that be?' He answered, 'I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one's life.'" On another occasion someone knocked at the saint's door and cried, "Is Bayazid here?" Bayazid answered, "Is anybody here except God?

Every one belongs to every one else.

His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.

The sick woman was usurping the place of the healthy one. He was being dragged back from the memory of the sunlit down and the quick, laughing girl, back to this unhealthy, overheated room and its complaining occupant.

Pain's a delusion. Oh, is it? said the Savage and, picking up a thick hzel switch, strode forward. The man from the The Fordian Science Monitor made a dash for his helicopter.

She was like a permanent invasion of one's privacy.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.

the good that I would,'" he quoted, "'I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. WILLIAM BLAKE

it was four years since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at peace, the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent as ever—more so, indeed, if that were possible. If only he could understand, if the heavens would but make a sign!

Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

You forget, I said, I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.

I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to be or not.

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than try to be a little kinder.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

They seemed to have imagined that scientific progress could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest secondary and subordinate.