Aldous Huxley Quotes

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. . . .

I am I, and I wish I weren’t.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.

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

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.

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

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

Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

No social stability without individual stability.

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.

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

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.

You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.

Nothing costs enough here.

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.

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.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Isn’t there something in living dangerously?

Pain was a fascinating horror.

Ending is better than mending.

“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.”

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

“These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.”

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.”

“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.”

“Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”

“The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.”

“But 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 cocksure, 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.”

“We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

“Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

“Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.”

“Familiarity breeds indifference.”

“At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

“For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.”

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”

For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.

Result: they’re decanted as freemartins--structurally quite normal (except, he had to admit, that they do have just the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last,” continued Mr. Foster, “out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.”

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity? It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.”

‘The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’

“And that,′ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.’

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder. ‘They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.’

‘We condition the masses to hate the country,’ concluded the Director. ‘But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports.’

‘Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.’

’Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too--all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides--made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!

Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten...and he sat down on the bench with the D.H.C., he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them... straight from the horse’s mouth.

Try to imagine what “living with one’s family” meant.′ They tried; but obviously without the smallest success. ‘And do you know what a “home” was?’ They shook their heads.

Ending is better than mending.

‘I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,’ she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) ‘That is,’ Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, ‘if you still want to have me.’

He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke--asked him who his mother was, or something like that.

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

“Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched--wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public.”

‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked, ‘as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using--you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?’

“I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it--only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing... Or else something else to write about...”

″‘You see,’ he went on at last, ‘I’m pretty good at inventing phrases--you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.‘”

″‘Oh, as far as they go.’ Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. ‘But they go such a little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say?

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they’ll go through anything.

But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing--you know, like the very hardest X-rays--when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?

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

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one...

″‘I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,’ said Lenina, with conviction. ‘And if you were an Epsilon,’ said Henry, ‘your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.‘”

Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning.

Walking and talking--that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

″‘But I do,’ he insisted. ‘It makes me feel as though...’ he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, ‘as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body.‘”

“I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

“Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day.”

″‘Listen, I beg you,’ cried the Savage earnestly. ‘Lend me your ears...’ He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. ‘Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.’ Poison to soul as well as body.‘”

“Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”

We believe in happiness and stability.

You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles.′

Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

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

He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say...

″‘What a hideous colour khaki is,’ remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopædic prejudices of her caste.”

″‘My word,’ said Lenina, ‘I’m glad I’m not a Gamma.‘”

“All men are physico-chemically equal,”

“Every one belongs to every one else, after all.”

‘Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.’