Aldous Huxley
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.Collection: Children
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.Collection: Grace
Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individual experience.Collection: Mystical Experiences
I don't care where I'm from, nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.Collection: Care
Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.Collection: Atheism
After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.Collection: Reading
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.Collection: Passion
When the individual feels, the community reels.Collection: Brave New World
We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?Collection: Art
Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.Collection: Sunset
Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.Collection: Men
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.Collection: Looks
Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.Collection: Education
I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.Collection: Writing
When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.Collection: Life
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.Collection: Soul
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard?Collection: Winning
An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.Collection: Self
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.Collection: Sacrifice
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.Collection: Christian
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given.Collection: Self
We can't allow science to undo its own good work.Collection: Good Work
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.Collection: Civilization
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.Collection: Life
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.Collection: Art
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.Collection: Pain
The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.Collection: Self
A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.Collection: Character
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Hipster
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.Collection: Lonely
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.Collection: About Writing
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.Collection: Justice
In real life there is no such thing as the average man.Collection: Real
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.Collection: Country
Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.Collection: Country
All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.Collection: Book
When truth is nothing but truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.Collection: Real
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow’s misdeeds out of yesterday’s miscreeds?Collection: Fun
The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable.Collection: Real
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.Collection: Book