Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Words are good servants but bad masters.
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The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
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Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
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Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
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Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
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In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called 'the Bitch Goddess, Success.' Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.
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The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
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The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.
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How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called 'numinous'. Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.
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Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
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Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
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Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.
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It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.
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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
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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.
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Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.
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The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg - eight ninths below the water line, one ninth above.
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It is a political axiom that power follows property.
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At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
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God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.
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Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.
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Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
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At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.