Quotes from Aldous Huxley

The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

La visión de aquel rostro transfigurado era a la vez una acusación y un irónico recordatorio de su propio aislamiento. Bernard se sentía ahora tan desdichadamente aislado como cuando había empezado el Servicio; más aislado a causa de su vaciedad no llenada, de su saciedad mortal. Separado y fuera de la armonía, en tanto que los otros se fundían en el Ser Más Grande.

Karuna. Karuna." And a semitone lower, "Attention.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Para la mayoría, la mescalina es casi completamente inocua. En contraste con el alcohol, no lleva a quien la toma a esa especie de acción sin trabas que se traduce en riñas, crímenes de violencia y accidentes de tránsito. Un hombre bajo la influencia de la mescalina se dedica tranquilamente a sus propios asuntos.

No podemos permitir que la ciencia destruya su propia obra. Por esto limitamos tan escrupulosamente el alcance de sus investigaciones.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Porque nuestro mundo no es el mundo de Otelo. No se pueden fabricar coches sin acero; y no se pueden crear tragedias sin inestabilidad social.

Lo que los dos hombres tenían en común era el conocimiento de que eran individuos.

El afán de trascender del autoconsciente es, como he dicho, un principal apetito del alma.

Si el adoctrinamiento está bien conducido, prácticamente todo el mundo puede ser convertido en lo que sea

Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction.

La indiferencia es una forma de pereza, y la pereza es uno de los síntomas del desamor. Nadie es haragán con lo que ama.

Curious that one should be dumb before intimates and open one's mind to an all but stranger.

A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should word, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.

W]hen Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and [...] when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.

In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience. It is fatal to prejudge it, to compel it to fit the mould imposed by a theory which either does not correspond to the facts at all, or corresponds to only some of the facts.

It's an affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out.

We cannot hope to utter anything worth saying, unless we read and inwardly digest the utterances of our betters.

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescaline, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness.

F]amiliarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but something which, for practical purposes, is almost as bad - namely a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words.

Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude

A gramme in time saves nine.