Quotes by Aldous Huxley

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

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. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. 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, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…

Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.

God isnt the son of Memory; Hes the son of Immediate Experience. You cant worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, its 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, youve got to die to every other moment.

All crosses had their tops cut and became Ts. There was also a thing called God.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isnt 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.

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol....There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality....But they used to take morphia and cocaine....Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178....Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug....Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant....All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects....Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology....Stability was practically assured.

But I dont want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.In fact, said Mustapha Mond, youre claiming the right to be unhappy. All right then, said the Savage defiantly, Im claiming the right to be unhappy.Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. There was a long silence. I claim them all, said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. Youre welcome, he said.

A felicidade nunca é graciosa.Happiness is never gracious.

Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.