Aldous Huxley Quotes
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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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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
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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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There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
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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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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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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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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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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
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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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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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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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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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Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
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Out psychological experiences are all equally facts.
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You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
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To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
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Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
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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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'Is it agreeable?' somebody asked.