Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right

Every man's memory is his private literature.

The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.

Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

No social stability without individual stability.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

I'd rather be myself, he said. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling...

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont .

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

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

Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.