208 quotes
It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.
Texts and Pretexts (1932)
Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.
Ends and Means (1937)
If one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness.
Crome Yellow (1921)
In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called “the Bitch Goddess, Success.” Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.
Do What You Will (1928)
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory — reason.
Crome Yellow (1921)
[W]hich is better — to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?
Island (1962)
It is a little embarrassing that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other
This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (1968)
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)
Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.
No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hygienic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery — the necessity of working.
Antic Hay (1923)
Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor!
We'll pledge our Empire vast across the flood:
For Blood, as all men know, than Water's thicker,
But Water's wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.
Leda (1920)
“Beetles, black beetles” — his father had a really passionate feeling about the clergy. Mumbojumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict old school he was.
Antic Hay (1923)
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Jesting Pilate (1926)
In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.
Themes and Variations (1950)
[H]e had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular.
Crome Yellow (1921)
At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx,
I taste a strange apocalypse
All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
The Doors of Perception (1954)