Quotes from Aldous Huxley

But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy. But everyone belongs to everyone else, he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb. The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic , self-evident, utterly indisputable.

Holiness, on the contrary, is the total denial of the separative self, in its creditable no less than its discreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God.

At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could not escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.

We haven't any use for old things here." "Even when they're beautiful?" "Particularly when they're beautiful.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book.

In so far as it helps the individual to forget himself and his ready-made opinions about the universe, religion will prepare the way for realization. In so far as it arouses and justifies such passions as fear, scrupulosity, righteous indignation, institutional patriotism and crusading hate, in so far as it harps on the saving virtues of certain theological notions, certain hallowed arrangements of words, religion is an obstacle in the way of realization.

Mortification has to be carried to the pitch of non-attachment or (in the phrase of St. Fran$ois de Sales) 'holy indifference'; otherwise it merely transfers self-will from one channel to another, not merely without decrease in the total volume of that self-will, but sometimes with an actual increase.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

Are you sure?" asked the Savage. "Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death?

What need have we of repose when our minds and bodes come to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when we have social order?

Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is.