Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Radije ?u ostati ono što jesam,a ne netko drugi,ma koliko on veseo bio.

But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges, between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress?

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

El éxito se le subió a Bernard a la cabeza y le reconcilió casi completamente (como lo hubiese conseguido cualquier otro intoxicante) con un mundo que, hasta entonces, había juzgado poco satisfactorio. Desde el momento en que le reconocía a él como un ser importante, el orden de cosas era bueno.

El remordimiento crónico, y en ello están acordes todos los moralistas, es un sentimiento sumamente indeseable. Si has obrado mal, arrepiéntete, enmienda tus yerros en lo posible y encamina tus esfuerzos a la tarea de comportarte mejor la próxima vez. Pero en ningún caso debes entregarte a una morosa meditación sobre tus faltas. Revolcarse en el fango no es la mejor manera de limpiarse.

I am not very sociable and am always glad to return to solitude and the freedom that goes with solitude. This desire for freedom and solitude has lead to a not only to a consistent effort to avoid situations in which I would be under the control of other people, but also to an indifference to the satisfactions of power and position, things which impose a servitude...

To the puritan all things are impure

She lay awake at night, wondering what she ought to do. Life terrified her. She had a child's capacity for happiness, but also a child's fear, a child's inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified.

There aren't any lions in England, Lenina almost snapped. And even if there were, the Savage added, with sudden contemptuous resentment, people would kill them out of helicopters, I suppose, with poison gas or something.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say ... Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.

Por su misma naturaleza, cada espíritu con una encarnación está condenado a padecer y gozar en la soledad.

Je veux savoir ce que c'est que la passion, lui entendait-elle dire. Je veux ressentir quelque chose avec violence.

They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives.

They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.

When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.

Conventions are stupid things; but even the children of the spirit must make some compromise with the world.

Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?

But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

quis custodiet custodes?

Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly." "A

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless.

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.