Quotes from Aldous Huxley

But God doesn't change. Men do, though. What difference does that make? All the difference in the world.

Champagne has the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Do not strive to seek after the true," writes a Zen master, "only cease to cherish opinions.

Can we therefore be surprised if political action, undertaken, in all too many cases, not for the public good, but solely or at least primarily to gratify the power lusts of bad men, should prove so often either self-stultifying or downright disastrous?

Rage was making him fluent

At thirty-eight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown journalist. Now, at fifty... He paused modestly and made a little gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and expanding his fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of Nestle's milk—the two cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white, sleek, and fat. Before Inspiration and after.

That horrible Benito Hoover! And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

I know. But that is all the more reason for severity. His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual-- and, after all, what is an individual?

A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lowers classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. We condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.

on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st.

Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere

Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists. Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu, volupte

to shift the emphasis from

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. 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.

en ningún caso debes entregarte a una morosa meditación sobre tus faltas. Revolcarse en el fango no es la mejor manera de limpiarse.

Las palabras pueden ser como los rayos X, si se emplean adecuadamente: pasan a través de todo.

Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release.

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories_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.

Murder kills only the individual.

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness

Think of water under pressure in a pipe. They thought of it. I pierce it once, said the Controller. What a jet. He pierced it twenty times. There were twenty piddling little fountains. ~ Erasing passion and desire.

For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.