“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy."
..."What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
...
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
...
"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
...
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
...
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
...
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
...
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
...
"Stability was practically assured.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“Isn't there something in living dangerously?'
There's a great deal in it,' the Controller replied. 'Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.'
What?' questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.'
V.P.S.?'
Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconvenience.'
But I like the inconveniences.'
We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'
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.'
In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.
I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Born place: in Godalming, Surrey, England, The United Kingdom
Born date July 26, 1894
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“I shall have my lasso, I shall lead the course;
I recognize it’s time to mount a different horse.”
― Mie Hansson, quote from Where Pain Thrives
“I’m an idiot for thinking that one performance would change anything.
Maybe I should stop writing songs and start writing fiction.”
― Elizabeth Eulberg, quote from Take a Bow
“An ending and a beginning now knotted up forever. He expected the hues of the world to change to reflect that, but the earth and heavens remained the same muted shades, and there was no tremble of anger from the trees. No weeping whisper of wind. No siren wailed in the distance. The woods were just the woods, and the dirt was just the dirt.”
― Sarah Pinborough, quote from Behind Her Eyes
“So not every person fits into the little rooms we build to hold them. There are infinite combinations of human and inhuman, male and female, brown and white.”
― quote from Wake of Vultures
“It felt like I’d lost something I didn’t know I wanted. And I realized you could get used to anything—even being alone for years—right until the moment you touched something better than what you had.”
― Emma Scott, quote from The Butterfly Project
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