Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr Foster sighed and shook his head.

Is it true that human beings are nothing but the products of their social environment? And if it is not true, what justification can there be for maintaining that the individual is less important than the group of which he is a member?

Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica

Como seria divertido", pensou, "se não se tivesse de pensar na felicidade!

it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . ." "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it.

I'll MAKE you be free whether you want to or not.' -The Savage

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Fortunate boys!' said the Controller. 'No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, so as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.' 'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the DHC. 'All's well with the world.

Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.

El mejor de los descansos es el sueño; y tú a menudo lo buscas; sin embargo, temes torpemente la muerte, que es la misma cosa.

I want to know what passion is, she heard him saying. I want to feel something strongly.

Knowledge is always a function of being.

That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being...

no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior. Murder kills only the individual--and after all, what is an individual? With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test tubes, the incubators. We can make a new one with the greatest ease-- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.

Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

process. It's as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens.

back into the present, back into reality; the appalling present, the awful reality – but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.

They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?

All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane... That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...

And if you were an Epsilon,' said Henry, 'your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha.

Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed.