Aldous Huxley

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

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

“Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.”

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

“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.”

“I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.”

“There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....”

“The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. 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.”

“Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”

“Only times and places, only names and ghosts.”

“Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.”

“On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question.”

“We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.”

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

“My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

“Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep –”