"The Idea of Equality"
Source: Proper Studies (1927)
Aldous Huxley:
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Aldous Huxley Quotes
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, (1926)
Source: https://archive.org/details/jestingpilatedia0000huxl/page/214/mode/2up?q=To+travel+is+to+discover+that+everyone+is+wrong Part II: Malaya
“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of.”
Source: Eyeless in Gaza
“I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
Source: Brave New World
Source: Jesting Pilate
"Sermons in Cats the musical"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)
“Experience teaches only the teachable…”
Tragedy and the Whole Truth
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)
“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”
Readers Digest (1934)
“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
Source: Brave New World
As quoted in Huston Smith, "Aldous Huxley--A Tribute," The Psychedelic Review, (1964) Vol I, No.3, (Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue), p. 264-5
Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience
Source: Brave New World
“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
Source: Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
book
Island
Source: Vijaya in Island (1962)
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
Source: Brave New World
Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16<!-- p. 228-->
Source: Brave New World (1932)
Context: I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
"John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Source: The Genius And The Goddess
Variant: A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Source: Point Counter Point
“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
Source: The Art of Seeing
“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”
Source: Brave New World
“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
Source: Brave New World
Source: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 26; note: the character Mark Rampion, a writer, painter and fierce critic of modern society, is based on D. H. Lawrence.
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Context: 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.... The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions, just as in some ways the admirable man can have detestable opinions.... Many intellectuals, of course, don’t get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You’ve got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the nonintellectuals have always remained.... these nonintellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and... are preoccupied with making money... They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable.... The nonintellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings.... There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t of course the same as the obvious of the nonintellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.
Source: Ends and Means (1937)
