Quotes from Aldous Huxley

W]hen Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and [...] when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.

F]amiliarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but something which, for practical purposes, is almost as bad - namely a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude

As recently as a week ago, in the Director's office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. The Director's threats had actually elated him, made him feel larger than life.

Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don't select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It's like that poem of Wordsworth's, 'Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.' In

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.

It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly.

Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds, may be thought of [...] as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy.

He was wondering how anyone could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence.

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization." "What?" "It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added, in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.

To think of God as mere Power, and not also, at the same time as Power, Love and Wisdom, comes quite naturally to the ordinary, unregenerate human mind. Only the totally selfless are in a position to know experimentally that, in spite of everything, 'all will be well' and, in some way, already is well.