Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated one from another by irreducible differences.

Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.

Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.

Feeling are communicated by means of ideas, which are their intellectual equivalent; at the sound of the words conveying the ideas the appropriate emotion is evoked.

Y éste es el secreto de la felicidad y la virtud: amar lo que uno TIENE que hacer.

Porque es antiguo; ésta es la razón principal. Aquí las cosas antiguas no nos son útiles. —¿Aunque sean bellas? —Especialmente cuando son bellas. La belleza ejerce una atracción, y nosotros no queremos que la gente se sienta atraída por cosas antiguas. Queremos que les gusten las nuevas.

Partly on his interest being focussed on what he calls 'the soul,' which he persists in regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried to point out to him . . .

Kebahagiaan adalah produk sampingan yang kita peroleh dalam proses mengerjakan sesuatu yang lain.

Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible." "Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.

The night stank and was loud with flies.

Life is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand.

Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence.

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the sacle and of total control at the other.

We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent—and in an absolute sense we can know nothing—a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.

The mind is its own place; she carried her hell about with her.

To understand sympathetically, with one's whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult—is, so far as I am concerned, impossible.

One must have some basis of experience on which to build an imagination.

But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man-- that it is an unnatural state -- will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end...

To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.

Preaching is an art, and in this, as in all other arts, the bad performers far outnumber the good.

To criticise something imperfect is always amusing, and maybe profitable in those cases where the imperfections can be remedies.