Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Uno cree las cosas porque ah sido condicionado para creerlas.

As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine [techniques of propaganda] with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational [information] essential to the maintenance of individual liberty.

Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.

Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them.

Omission and simplification help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

No, el verdadero problema es: <<¿Por qué no puedo hablar?>> O, ya que en realidad sé perfectamente por qué, la pregunta adecuada es ¿qué sensación experimentaría si pudiera, si fuese libre, si no me hallara esclavizado por mi condicionamiento?

The effects of the mescalin were already on the decline: but the flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove. Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose.

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And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

An irrelevance, and your life's altered.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.

One seventh of your life is spent on Monday.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.