Quotes from Aldous Huxley

What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial.' '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.

To sum up, that mortification is the best which results in the elimination of self-will, self-interest, self-centred thinking, wishing and imagining. Extreme physical austerities are not likely to achieve this kind of mortification. But the acceptance of what happens to us (apart, of course, from our own sins) in the course of daily living is likely to produce this result.

But God doesn't change. Men do, though. What difference does that make? All the difference in the world.

That horrible Benito Hoover! And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere.

He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons — that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

When captured and brought to trial, many of those who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.

Books, he said—books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.

We are given two choices—famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes

It must be pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid, comfortable feeling.