Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...

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 believe in God.

Her face brightened with a sudden flash of mischief, and without warning she punched him, surprisingly hard, in the ribs. "There!" she said. "Now I feel much better.

What a hideous colour khaki is

One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

I'd rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self? William Law

You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly.

A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.

And yet our personal experience and the study of history make it abundantly clear that the means whereby we try to achieve something are at least as important as the end we wish to attain. Indeed they are even more important. For the means employed inevitably determine the nature of the result achieved; whereas, however good the end aimed at may be, its goodness is powerless to counteract the effects of the bad means we use to reach it.

Encendió un cigarrillo para desinfectar la memoria.

Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.

everybody happy and no one ever sad or angry, and every one belonging to every one else...

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. [...] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to obey you.

The secret of genius is to carry the child into old age.

Armamentos, deuda universal y obsolescencia planificada: ésos son los tres pilares de la prosperidad de Occidente.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.

La felicidad real siempre aparece escuálida por comparación con las compensaciones que ofrece la desdicha. Y, naturalmente , la estabilidad no es, ni con mucho, tan espectacular como la inestabilidad. Estar satisfecho de todo no posee el encanto que supone mantener una lucha justa contra la infelicidad, ni el pintorequismo del combate contra la tentación o contra una pasión fatal o una duda. La felicidad nunca tiene grandeza

You're aberrated in one way, he said to Will. I'm aberrated in another. A schizoid (isn't that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.