Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Why don't you give them these books about God? For the same reason as we don't give them Othello; they're old, they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now. But God doesn't change. Men do though.

Love is the plummet as well as the astrolabe of God's mysteries, and the pure in heart can see far down into the depths of the divine justice, to catch a glimpse, not indeed of the details of the cosmic process, but at least of its principle and nature. These insights permit them to say [...] that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe.

Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly unobvious notions into children's heads? By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.

Nature at the middle distance is familiar - so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. See very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.

I want to know what passion is,' he said. 'I want to feel something strongly. We are all grown-up intellectually and during working hours,' he went on, 'but we are infants where feeling and desire are concerned.

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.

What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the corners of the drawing-room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort?—that's all I ask for.

The philosophy that rationalizes power politics and justifies war and military training is always (whatever the official religion of the politicians and war makers) some wildly unrealistic doctrine of national, racial or ideological idolatry, having, as its inevitable corollaries, the notions of Herrenvolk and "the lesser breeds without the Law.

In nature, as in work of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being.

I'm feeling miserable . . . There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy ? only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, and sometime criminal ways that are so characteristically human.