Aldous Huxley Quotes
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All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
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It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.
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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
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All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.
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If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.
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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.
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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
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My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.
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There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
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It's a bit embarrassing... to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'
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One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.
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In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
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The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
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You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
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From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it science actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences-the experiences of sense.
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'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,' said Jefferson, 'it expects what never was and never will be.'
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'Is it agreeable?' somebody asked.
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After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.