Aldous Huxley Quotes (238 Quotes)

But every one belongs to every one else

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

It isn't only art that is incompatible with happiness, it's also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Can you say something about nothing?

No social stability without individual stability.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.

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.

Ending is better than mending.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.

One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God.

Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson-paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.

One egg, one embryo, one adult - normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where one grew before. Progress.

Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr Foster sighed and shook his head.

Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended--there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily...

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east...

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

And the present sheared asunder from the past, like an iceberg sheared off from its frozen parent cliffs, and went sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All the past ages had accomplished was as nothing.

If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre-preferably to Iceland. Good morning.

The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more riotous appetite.

You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.

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.