Aldous Huxley

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.”

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

“An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.”

“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.”

“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 rumor.”

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.”

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

“A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”

“Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

“A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.”

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

“The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.”

“Every man 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.”

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

“There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”

“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

“Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

“The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”

“Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”

“What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”

“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 rumor.”

“Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.”

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”

“Experience teaches only the teachable.”

“My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

“Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”

“The proper study of mankind is books.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

“If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.”

“Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

“Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.”

“The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”

“The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”

“Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”

“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”

“Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

“The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”

“Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”

“Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

“You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.”

“Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.”

“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”

“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

“It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.”

“Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

“Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

“Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.”

“That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.”

“The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”

“Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.”

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”

“Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.”

“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.”

“Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”

“From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”

“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.”

“I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.”

“Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.”

“Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.”

“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”

“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“Experience teaches only the teachable.”

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”

“What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”

“A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.”

“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

“The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.”

“We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”

“Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.”

“It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.”

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

“What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.”

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

“There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.”

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.”

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

“Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.”

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.”

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

“There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”

“As for 'taking sides' — the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.”

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.”

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

“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.”

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

“You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

“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.”

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

“Words are good servants but bad masters.”

“Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.”

“It's a bit embarrassing... to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'”

“Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.”

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

“Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkels and softens the body while it still lives, tots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.”

“The proper study of mankind is books.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

“There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.”

“To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.”

“It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.”

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

“One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time—that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.”

“Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.”

“There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.”

“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”

“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.”

“A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”

“The film concludes with … the most nauseatingly luscious, the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that it has ever been my lot to hear. My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out those sodden words, the greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.”

“To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.”

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”

“I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'”

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

“Experience teaches only the teachable…”

“How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.”

“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 wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

“Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society”

“Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”

“You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many be corrupted.”

“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

“Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”

“The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg — eight ninths below the water line, one ninth above.”

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.”

“People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.”

“Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.”

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”

“The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”

“Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.”

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.”

“A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.”

“The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”

“It is 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.”

“Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.”

“It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.”

“Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.”

“One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.”

“The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.”

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”

“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

“Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.”

“Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.”

“The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of escape from the self-imposed necessity of self-destruction.”

“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?”

“Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”

“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

“Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.”

“"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked.”

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

“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.”

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

“We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.”

“The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.”

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”

“The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.”

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

“Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.”

“Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”

“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

“Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

“In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual.… Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.”

“It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.”

“However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.”

““If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” said Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.””

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.”

“Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.”

“The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.”

“The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.”

“Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.”

“The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.”

“The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”

“Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.”

“Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?”

“In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.”

“It is a political axiom that power follows property.”

“At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?”

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours”

“Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.”

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”

“And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”

“God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

“What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”