Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.

You remind me o another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reasons for what one believes by instinct.

The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense.

the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

But I do, he insisted. It makes me feel as though … he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body. Doesn't it make you feel like that, Lenina?

no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.

The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.

Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.

Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seems to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt.

the extreme ugliness of her appearance, the Savage frequently goes to see her and appears to be much attached to her - an interesting example of the way in which early conditioning can be made to change and even run against natural responses (in this case, the natural response to draw back from an unpleasant object).' ***

If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.

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. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the sexual instinct is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural instinct can be said to be good or bad.

And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might get up at six.

Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.

From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.

You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.

It is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.

Le galbe évasé de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't occur?

Only the most ingeniously optimistic, the most wilfully blind to the facts of history and psychology, can believe that paper guarantees of liberty - guarantees wholly unsupported by the realities of political and economic power - will be scrupulously respected by those who have known only the facts of governmental omnipotence on the one hand and, on the other, of mass dependence upon, and consequently subservience to, the state and its representatives.

Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgment or to feel doubt.

The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system.