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Every Individual Is At Once The Beneficiary And The Victim Of The Linguistic Tradition Into Which He Has Been Born - The Beneficiary Inasmuch As Language Gives Access To The Accumulated Records Of Other People's Experience, The Victim In So Far As It Confirms Him In The Belief That Reduced Awareness Is The Only Awareness And As It Bedevils His Sense Of Reality, So That He Is All Too Apt To Take His Concepts For Data, His Words For Actual Things.

-Aldous Huxley

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Every Individual Is At

Aldous Huxley

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Every Individual Is At Once The Beneficiary And The Victim Of The Linguistic Tradition Into Which He Has Been Born - The Beneficiary Inasmuch As Language Gives Access To The Accumulated Records Of Other People's Experience, The Victim In So Far As It Confirms Him In The Belief That Reduced Awareness Is The Only Awareness And As It Bedevils His Sense Of Reality, So That He Is All Too Apt To Take His Concepts For Data, His Words For Actual Things.

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Work Is Prayer. Work Is Also Stink. Therefore Stink Is Prayer.

The Amelioration Of The World Cannot Be Achieved By Sacrifices In Moments Of Crisis; It Depends On The Efforts Made And Constantly Repeated During The Humdrum, Uninspiring Periods, Which Separate One Crisis From Another, And Of Which Normal Lives Mainly Consist.

Armaments, Universal Debt, And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity. If War, Waste, And Moneylenders Were Abolished, You'd Collapse. And While You People Are Overconsuming The Rest Of The World Sinks More And More Deeply Into Chronic Disaster.

Nothing Is More Dreadful Than A Cold, Unimpassioned Indulgence. And Love Infallibly Becomes Cold And Unimpassioned When It Is Too Lightly Made.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism

I Have Always Found That Angels Have The Vanity To Speak Of Themselves As The Only Wise.

The Gods Are Just. No Doubt. But Their Code Of Law Is Dictated, In The Last Resort, By The People Who Organize Society; Providence Takes Its Cue From Men.

Brave New World

Seated Upon The Convex Mound Of One Vast Kidney, Jonah Prays And Sings His Canticles And Hymns, Making The Hollow Vault Resound God's Goodness And Mysterious Ways, Till The Great Fish Spouts Music As He Swims.

Most Men And Women Lead Lives At The Worst So Painful, At The Best So Monotonous, Poor And Limited That The Urge To Escape, The Longing To Transcend Themselves If Only For A Few Moments, Is And Has Always Been One Of The Principal Appetites Of The Soul.

...it Is Not What One Has Experienced But What One Does With What One Has Experienced That Matters.

Abused As We Abuse It At Present, Dramatic Art Is In No Sense Cathartic; It Is Merely A Form Of Emotional Masturbation.

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.

These Are The Sort Of Things People Ought To Look At. Things Without Pretensions, Satisfied To Be Merely Themselves.

A Man May Be A Pessimistic Determinist Before Lunch And An Optimistic Believer In The Will's Freedom After It.

Hell Is The Incapacity To Be Other Than The Creature One Finds Oneself Ordinarily Behaving As.

Our Vanity Makes Us Exaggerate The Importance Of Human Life; The Individual Is Nothing; Nature Cares Only For The Species.

I Ate Civilization. It Poisoned Me; I Was Defiled. And Then," He Added In A Lower Tone, "i Ate My Own Wickedness.

Industrial Man—a Sentient Reciprocating Engine Having A Fluctuating Output, Coupled To An Iron Wheel Revolving With Uniform Velocity. And Then We Wonder Why This Should Be The Golden Age Of Revolution And Mental Derangement.

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.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Books.

Some Of The Greatest Advances In Mathematics Have Been Due To The Invention Of Symbols, Which It Afterwards Became Necessary To Explain; From The Minus Sign Proceeded The Whole Theory Of Negative Quantities.

Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity

Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man; It Is What A Man Does With What Happens To Him. It Is A Gift For Dealing With The Accidents Of Existence, Not The Accidents Themselves.

The Social Body Persists Although The Component Cells May Change.

Medical Science Is Making Such Remarkable Progress That Soon None Of Us Will Be Well.

Medical Science

If Most Of Us Remain Ignorant Of Ourselves, It Is Because Self-knowledge Is Painful And We Prefer The Pleasures Of Illusion.

Dedicated To All Those Who Say: "i Don't Have Time For Analytics" Or "i Don't Understand Analytics".

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.

Human Beings Act In A Great Variety Of Irrational Ways, But All Of Them Seem To Be Capable, If Given A Fair Chance, Of Making A Reasonable Choice In The Light Of Available Evidence. Democratic Institutions Can Be Made To Work Only If All Concerned Do Their Best To Impart Knowledge And To Encourage Rationality. But Today, In The World's Most Powerful Democracy, The Politicians And The Propagandists Prefer To Make Nonsense Of Democratic Procedures By Appealing Almost Exclusively To The Ignorance And Irrationality Of The Electors.

Facts Are Ventriloquist’s 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.

Cynical Realism Is The Intelligent Man's Best Excuse For Doing Nothing In An Intolerable Situation.

I Am Entirely On The Side Of Mystery. I Mean, Any Attempt To Explain Away The Mystery Is Ridiculous. I Believe In The Profound And Unfathomable Mystery Of Life Which Has A Sort Of Divine Quality About It.

So The Journey Is Over And I Am Back Again Where I Started, Richer By Much Experience And Poorer By Many Unexploded Certainties. For Convictions And Certainties Are Too Often The Concomitants Of Ignorance. Those Who Like To Feel They Are Always Right And Who Attached A High Importance To Their Own Opinions Should Stay At Home. When One Is Traveling, Convictions Are Mislaid As Easily As Spectacles; But Unlike Spectacles, They Are Not Easily Replaced.

But Then Every Man Is Ludicrous If You Look At Him From Outside, Without Taking Into Account What’s Going On In His Heart And Mind.

I Will Have No Parsons Around Me But Such As Drink Deep, Ride To Hounds And Caress The Wives And Daughters Of Their Parishioners.a Virtuous Parson Does Nothing To Test Or Exercise The Faith Of His Flock.

Thought Must Be Divided Against Itself Before It Can Come To Any Knowledge Of Itself.

People Are Much Too Solemn About Things - I'm All For Sticking Pins Into Episcopal Behinds.

What’s The Point Of Truth Or Beauty Or Knowledge When Anthrax Bombs Are Popping All Around You?

Brave New World

... One Reads, Above All, To Prevent Oneself Thinking.

No Romeo-and-juliet Acts, No Nonsense About Love With A Large L, None Of That Popular Song Claptrap With Its Skies Of Blue, Dreams Come True, Heaven With You. Just Sensuality For Its Own Sake.

Writers Write To Influence Their Readers, Their Preachers, Their Auditors, But Always, At Bottom, To Be More Themselves.

Assembled In A Crowd, People Lose Their Powers Of Reasoning And Their Capacity For Moral Choice.

Successfully (whatever That May Mean) Or Unsuccessfully, We All Overact The Part Of Our Favorite Character In Fiction.

Science In Itself Is Morally Neutral; It Becomes Good Or Evil According As It Is Applied.

Music Is An Ocean, But The Repertory Is Hardly Even A Lake; It Is A Pond.

The Humanity Of Men And Women Is Inversely Proportional To Their Numbers. A Crowd Is No More Human Than An Avalanche Or A Whirlwind. A Rabble Of Men And Women Stands Lower In The Scale Of Moral And Intellectual Being Than A Herd Of Swine Or Of Jackals.

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.

Procrastination

Visionary Experience Is Not The Same As Mystical Experience. Mystical Experience Is Beyond The Realm Of Opposites. Visionary Experience Is Still Within That Realm. Heaven Entails Hell, And 'going To Heaven' Is No More Liberation Than Is The Descent Into Horror. Heaven Is Merely A Vantage Point From Which The Divine Ground Can Be More Clearly Seen Than On The Level Of Ordinary Individual Experience.

Mystical Experiences

Our Goal Is To Discover That We Have Always Been Where We Ought To Be

I'm Afraid Of Losing My Obscurity. Genuineness Only Thrives In The Dark. Like Celery.

All Democracies Are Based On The Proposition That Power Is Very Dangerous And That It Is Extremely Important Not To Let Any One Person Or Small Group Have Too Much Power For Too Long A Time

Can We Unite Against Ourselves For Our Own Higher Interest?

Words Form The Thread On Which We String Our Experiences. [therefore Be Careful How You Interpret Your Life. Don't Think Or Speak Negatively Lest Your Subconscious And Others Take You At Your Word And You Are Hung By Your Own Tongue!]

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 World Is An Illusion, But An Illusion Which We Must Take Seriously.

Higher Education Is Not Necessarily A Guarantee Of Higher Virtue.

Ironically Enough, The Only People Who Can Hold Up Indefinitely Under The Stress Of Modern War Are Psychotics. Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity.

Words Play An Enormous Part In Our Lives And Are Therefore Deserving Of The Closest Study.

Sons Have Always A Rebellious Wish To Be Disillusioned By That Which Charmed Their Fathers.

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

Love Casts Out Fear; But Conversely Fear Casts Out Love. And Not Only Love. Fear Also Casts Out Intelligence, Casts Out Goodness, Casts Out All Thought Of Beauty And Truth.

The Trouble With Fiction," Said John Rivers, "is That It Makes Too Much Sense. Reality Never Makes Sense.

There's Only One Effectively Redemptive Sacrifice, The Sacrifice Of Self-will To Make Room For The Knowledge Of God.

If One's Different, One's Bound To Be Lonely.

In A Word, They Failed To Take Into Account Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions.

But The Nature Of The Universe Is Such That Ends Can Never Justify Means. On The Contrary, The Means Always Determine The End.

The Secret Of Genius Is To Carry The Spirit Of The Child Into Old Age, Which Mean Never Losing Your Enthusiasm.

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

A Gramme Is Better Than A Damn.

If The Prince Of Peace Should Come To Earth, One Of The First Things He Would Do Would Be To Put Psychiatrists In Their Place.

It Isn't A Matter Of Forgetting. What One Has To Learn Is How To Remember And Yet Be Free Of The Past.

When The Individual Feels, The Community Reels.

Brave New World

On No Account Brood Over Your Wrongdoing. Rolling In The Muck Is Not The Best Way Of Getting Clean.

Brave New World

You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

All That Happens Means Something; Nothing You Do Is Ever Insignificant.

There Are Confessable Agonies, Sufferings Of Which One Can Positively Be Proud. Of Bereavement, Of Parting, Of The Sense Of Sin And The Fear Of Death The Poets Have Eloquently Spoken. They Command The World's Sympathy. But There Are Also Discreditable Anguishes, No Less Excruciating Than The Others, But Of Which The Sufferer Dare Not, Cannot Speak. The Anguish Of Thwarted Desire, For Example.

The Whole Story Of The Universe Is Implicit In Any Part Of It. The Meditative Eye Can Look Through Any Single Object And See, As Through A Window, The Entire Cosmos. Make The Smell Of Roast Duck In An Old Kitchen Diaphanous And You Will Have A Glimpse Of Everything, From The Spiral Nebulae To Mozart's Music And The Stigmata Of St. Francis Of Assisi. The Artistic Problem Is To Produce Diaphanousness In Spots, Selecting The Spots So As To Reveal Only The Most Humanly Significant Of Distant Vistas Behind The Near Familiar Object.

Somewhere In The Rain, There Will Always Be An Abandoned Dog That Prevents You From Being Happy.

Knowledge Is An Affair Of Symbols And Is, All Too Often, A Hindrance To Wisdom, The Uncovering Of The Self From Moment To Moment

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 Of 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.

Every Ceiling Reached Becomes A Floor.

The Condition Of Being Forgiven Is Self-abandonment. The Proud Man Prefers Self-reproach, However Painful --because The Reproached Self Isn't Abandoned; It Remains Intact.

The Alexander Technique Gives Us All Things We Have Been Looking For In A System Of Physical Education: Relief From Strain Due To Maladjustment, And Constant Improvement In Physical And Mental Health. We Cannot Ask For More From Any System; Nor, If We Seriously Desire To Alter Human Beings In A Desirable Direction, Can We Ask For Any Less.

Culture Is Like The Sum Of Special Knowledge That Accumulates In Any Large United Family And Is The Common Property Of All Its Members. When We Of The Great Culture Family Meet, We Exchange Reminiscences About Grandfather Homer, And That Awful Old Dr. Johnson, And Aunt Sappho, And Poor Johnny Keats.

To Associate With Other Like-minded People In Small, Purposeful Groups Is For The Great Majority Of Men And Women A Source Of Profound Psychological Satisfaction. Exclusiveness Will Add To The Pleasure Of Being Several, But At One; And Secrecy Will Intensify It Almost To Ecstasy.

Everyone Who Wants To Do Good To The Human Race Always Ends In Universal Bullying.

The Innocence Of Those Who Grind The Faces Of The Poor, But Refrain From Pinching The Bottoms Of Their Neighbour's Wives! The Innocence Of Ford, The Innocence Of Rockefeller! The Nineteenth Century Was The Age Of Innocence--that Sort Of Innocence. With The Result That We're Now Almost Ready To Say That A Man Is Seldom More Innocently Employed Than When Making Love.

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.

A Whole Population Of Strangers Inhabited And Shaped That Little Body, Lived In That Mind And Controlled Its Wishes, Dictated Its Thoughts...the Name Was An Abstraction, A Title Arbitrarily Given, Like "france" Or "england," To A Collection, Never Long The Same, Of Many Individuals Who Were Born, Lived, And Died Within Him, As The Inhabitants Of A Country Appear And Disappear, But Keep Alive In Their Passage The Identity Of The Nation To Which They Belong.

Her Cheeks Were Flushed. She Caught Hold Of The Savage's Arm And Pressed It, Limp, Against Her Side. He Looked Down At Her For A Moment, Pale, Pained, Desiring, And Ashamed Of His Desire. He Was Not Worthy, Not... Their Eyes For A Moment Met. What Treasures Hers Promised! A Queen's Ransom Of Temperament. Hastily He Looked Away, Disengaged His Imprisoned Arm. He Was Obscurely Terrified Lest She Should Cease To Be Something He Could Feel Himself Unworthy Of.

Man's Life On Earth Has Only One End And Purpose: To Identify Himself With His Eternal Self And So To Come To Unitive Knowledge Of The Divine Ground.

People Will Come To Love Their Oppression, To Adore The Technologies That Undo Their Capacities To Think.

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.

A Type Of Revolutionary Novelty May Be Extremely Beautiful In Itself; But, For The Creatures Of Habit That We Are, Its Very Novelty Tends To Make It Illegible, At Any Rate To Begin With.

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Are Not Interested In Reason Or Satisfied With What It Teaches.

Love Is As Necessary To Human Beings As Food And Shelter; [but] Without Intelligence, ... Love Is Impotent And Freedom Unattainable.

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 Survival Of Democracy Depends On The Ability Of Large Numbers Of People To Make Realistic Choices In The Light Of Adequate Information.

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.

Brave New World

The Optimum Population Is Modeled On The Iceberg- Eight-ninths Below The Water Line, One-ninth Above.

Brave New World

Life's So Ordinary That Literature Has To Deal With The Exceptional. Exceptional Talent, Power, Social Position, Wealth.... Dramabegins Where There's Freedom Of Choice. And Freedom Of Choice Begins When Social Or Psychological Conditions Are Exceptional. That's Why The Inhabitants Of Imaginative Literature Have Always Been Recruited From The Pages Of Who's Who.

It Isn’t Only Art That Is Incompatible With Happiness, It’s Also Science. Science Is Dangerous, We Have To Keep It Most Carefully Chained And Muzzled.

Brave New World Happiness

Official Dignity Tends To Increase In Inverse Ratio To The Importance Of The Country In Which The Office Is Held.

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.

Drill And Uniforms Impose An Architecture On The Crowd. An Army's Beautiful. But That's Not All; It Panders To Lower Instincts Than The Aesthetic. The Spectacle Of Human Beings Reduced To Automatism Satisfies The Lust For Power. Looking At Mechanized Slaves, One Fancies Oneself A Master.

Children Are Remarkable For Their Intelligence And Ardor, For Their Curiosity, Their Intolerance Of Shams, The Clarity And Ruthlessness Of Their Vision.

All Urbanization, Pushed Beyond A Certain Point, Automatically Becomes Suburbanization.... Every Great City Is Just A Collection Of Suburbs. Its Inhabitantsdo Not Live In Their City; They Merely Inhabit It.

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

Nonsense Is An Assertion Of Man's Spiritual Freedom In Spite Of All The Oppressions Of Circumstance.

The Author Of The Iliad Is Either Homer Or, If Not Homer, Somebody Else Of The Same Name.

I Am I, And I Wish I Weren't.

If You Want To Write, Keep Cats.

In Spiritual Matters, Knowledge Is Dependent Upon Being; As We Are, So We Know.

The Thin And Precarious Crust Of Decency Is All That Separates Any Civilization, However Impressive, From The Hell Of Anarchy Or Systematic Tyranny Which Lie In Wait Beneath The Surface .

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

The Horror No Less Than The Charm Of Real Life Consists Precisely In The Recurrent Actualization Of The Inconceivable

They're Old; They're About God Hundreds Of Years Ago. Not About God Now" "but God Doesn't Change" "men Do Though

Brave New World Happiness

The People Who Kill And Torture And Tell Lies In The Name Of Their Sacred Causes, These Are Never The Publicans And The Sinners. No, They're The Virtuous, Respectable Men, Who Have The Finest Feelings, The Best Brains, The Noblest Ideals.

One Cubic Centimeter Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments.

Unlike The Masses, Intellectuals Have A Taste For Rationality And An Interest In Facts.

Grace Is Always Sufficient, Provided We Are Ready To Cooperate With It.

Doing Your Best

We Are All Geniuses Up To The Age Of Ten.

One Of The Many Reasons For The Bewildering And Tragic Character Of Human Existence Is The Fact That Social Organization Is At Once Necessary And Fatal. Men Are Forever Creating Such Organizations For Their Own Convenience And Forever Finding Themselves The Victims Of Their Home-made Monsters.

Everybody Strains After Happiness, And The Result Is That Nobody's Happy.

If One Is Not Oneself A Sage Or Saint, The Best Thing One Can Do Is To Study The Words Of Those Who Were.

Lying In Bed, He Would Think Of Heaven And London.

We Tend To Think And Feel In Terms Of The Art We Like; And If The Art We Like Is Bad Then Our Thinking And Feeling Will Be Bad. And If The Thinking And Feeling Of Most Of The Individuals Composing A Society Is Bad, Is Not That Society In Danger?

The Savage Interrupted Him. "but Isn't It Natural To Feel There's A God?" "you Might As Well Ask If It's Natural To Do Up One's Trousers With Zippers," Said The Controller Sarcastically. "you Remind Me Of Another Of Those Old Fellows Called Bradley. He Defined Philosophy As The Finding Of Bad Reason For What One Believes By Instinct. As If One Believed Anything By Instinct! One Believes Things Because One Has Been Conditioned To Believe Them. Finding Bad Reasons For What One Believes For Other Bad Reasons – That's Philosophy. People Believe In God Because They've Been Conditioned To."

At This Very Moment,... The Most Frightful Horrors Are Taking Place In Every Corner Of The World. People Are Being Crushed, Slashed, Disembowelled, Mangled; Their Dead Bodies Rot And Their Eyes Decay With The Rest. Screams Of Pain And Fear Go Pulsing Through The Air At The Rate Of Eleven Hundred Feet Per Second. After Travelling For Three Seconds They Are Perfectly Inaudible. These Are Distressing Facts; But Do We Enjoy Life Any The Less Because Of Them? Most Certainly We Do Not.

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.

The Instinct Of Acquisitiveness Has More Perverts, I Believe, Than The Instinct Of Sex. At Any Rate, People Seem To Me Odder About Money Than About Even Their Amours.

When Truth Is Nothing But Truth, It's Unnatural, It's An Abstraction That Resembles Nothing In The Real World.

The Bhagavad-gita Is The Most Systematic Statement Of Spiritual Evolution Of Endowing Value To Mankind. It Is One Of The Most Clear And Comprehensive Summaries Of Perennial Philosophy Ever Revealed; Hence Its Enduring Value Is Subject Not Only To India But To All Of Humanity.

When An Artist Deserts To The Side Of The Angels, It Is The Most Odious Of Treasons.

De Sade Is The One Completely Consistent And Thoroughgoing Revolutionary Of History.

But The Quiet Grows And Grows. Beautifully And Unbearably.

Why Should Human Females Become Sterile In Their Forties, While Female Crocodiles Continue To Lay Eggs Into Their Third Century?

To Be Excited Is Still To Be Unsatisfied.

Cant Is Always Rather Nauseating; But Before We Condemn Political Hypocrisy, Let Us Remember That It Is The Tribute Paid By Men Of Leather To Men Of God, And That The Acting Of The Part Of Someone Better Than Oneself May Actually Commit One To A Course Of Behavior Perceptibly Less Evil Than What Would Be Normal And Natural In An Avowed Cynic.

For In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody.

Almost All Of Us Long For Peace And Freedom; But Very Few Of Us Have Much Enthusiasm For The Thoughts, Feelings, And Actions That Make For Peace And Freedom.

Isn't It Remarkable How Everyone Who Knew [d.h.] Lawrence Has Felt Compelled To Write About Him? Why, He's Had More Books Written About Him Than Any Writer Since Byron!

Reality, No Matter How Utopian, Seems To Be Something People Need To Frequently Take A Holiday From.

We Participate In A Tragedy; At A Comedy We Only Look.

All Of Us Desire A Better State Of Society. But Society Cannot Become Better Before Two Great Tasks Are Performed.unless Peace Can Be Firmly Established And The Prevailing Obsession With Money And Power Profoundly Modified, There Is No Hope Of Any Desirable Change Being Made.

Technological Progress Has Merely Provided Us With More Efficient Means For Going Backwards.

A Million Million Spermatozoa, All Of Them Alive: Out Of Their Cataclysm But One Poor Noah Dare Hope To Survive.

Sixty Two Thousand Four Hundred Repetitions Make One Truth. Idiots!

Brave New World

What Drivel It All Is!... A String Of Words Called Religion. Another String Of Words Called Philosophy. Half A Dozen Other Stringscalled Political Ideals. And All The Words Either Ambiguous Or Meaningless. And People Getting So Excited About Them They'll Murder Their Neighbours For Using A Word They Don't Happen To Like. A Word That Probably Doesn't Mean As Much As A Good Belch. Just A Noise Without Even The Excuse Of Gas On The Stomach.

...wordless Conditioning Is Crude And Wholesale; Cannot Bring Home The Finer Distinctions, Cannot Inculcate The More Complex Courses Of Behavior. For That There Must Be Words, But Words Without Reason... Not So Much Like Drops Of Water, Though Water, It Is True, Can Wear Holes In The Hardest Granite; Rather, Drops Of Liquid Sealing-wax, Drops That Adhere, Encrust, Incorporate Themselves With What They Fall On, Till Finally The Rock Is All One Scarlet Blob.

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.

The Question Of The Next Generation Will Not Be One Of How To Liberate The Masses, But Rather, How To Make Them Love Their Servitude.

It Is Natural To Believe In God When You're Alone-- Quite Alone, In The Night, Thinking About Death.

Human Contacts Have Been So Highly Valued In The Past Only Because Reading Was Not A Common Accomplishment.... The World, You Must Remember, Is Only Just Becoming Literate. As Reading Becomes More And More Habitual And Widespread, An Ever-increasing Number Of People Will Discover That Books Will Give Them All The Pleasures Of Social Life And None Of Its Intolerable Tedium.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Faith, But Deliver Us, Dear God, From Belief.

Liberty? Why It Doesn't Exist. There Is No Liberty In This World, Just Gilded Cages.

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.

The Only Consistent People Are The Dead

Words Are Good Servants But Bad Masters.

Marble, I Perceive, Covers A Multitude Of Sins.

For 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

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.

I Want To Know What Passion Is. I Want To Feel Something Strongly.

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.

There Are Many Kinds Of Gods. Therefore There Are Many Kinds Of Men.

Each Person Is At Each Moment Capable Of Remembering All That Has Ever Happened To Him And Of Perceiving Everything That Is Happening Everywhere In The Universe.

Doors Of Perception

Art, I Suppose, Is Only For Beginners, Who Have Made Up In Their Minds To Be Content With Symbols Rather Than With What They Signify, With The Elegantly Composed Recipe In Lieu Of Actual Dinner.

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.

Impulse Arrested Spills Over, And The Flood Is Feeling, The Flood Is Passion, The Flood Is Even Madness: It Depends On The Force Of The Current, The Height And Strength Of The Barrier. The Unchecked Stream Flows Smoothly Down Its Appointed Channels Into A Calm Well Being.

Katy Was Neither A Methodist Nor A Masochist. She Was A Goddess And The Silence Of Goddesses Is Genuinely Golden. None Of Your Superficial Plating. A Solid, Twenty-two-carat Silence All The Way Through. The Olympian's Trap Is Kept Shut, Not By An Act Of Willed Discretion, But Because There's Really Nothing To Say. Goddesses Are All Of One Piece. There's No Internal Conflict In Them. Whereas The Lives Of People Like You And Me Are One Long Argument. Desires On One Side, Woodpeckers On The Other. Never A Moment Of Real Silence.

Chaos And Ineptitude Are Anti-human; But So Too Is A Superlatively Efficient Government, Equipped With All The Products Of A Highly Developed Technology.

The Best Way To Find Things Out Is Not To Ask Questions At All. If You Fire Off A Question, It Is Like Firing Off A Gun - Bang It Goes

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

Hell Isn't Merely Paved With Good Intentions; It's Walled And Roofed With Them. Yes, And Furnished Too.

Good Intentions

Pully, Hauly, Tug With A Will; The Gods Wiggle Waggle, But The Sky Stands Still.

Pleasure Cannot Be Shared; Like Pain, It Can Only Be Experienced Or Inflicted, And When We Give Pleasure To Our Lovers Or Bestow Charity Upon The Needy, We Do So, Not To Gratify The Object Of Our Benevolence, But Only Ourselves. For The Truth Is That We Are Kind For The Same Reason As We Are Cruel, In Order That We May Enhance The Sense Of Our Own Power.

Armaments, Universal Debt And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity.

In Real Life There Is No Such Person As The Average Man.

I'm Sick. I've Eaten Civilisation And I'm Sick.

The Place Is Good. How Good, One Must Have Circumnavigated The Globe To Discover. Why Not Stay? Take Root? But Roots Are Chains. I Have A Terror Of Losing My Freedom. Free, Without Ties, Unpossessed By Any Possessions, Free To Do As One Will, To Go At A Moment's Notice Wherever The Fancy May Suggest--it Is Good. But So Is This Place. Might It Not Be Better? To Gain Freedom One Sacrifices Something [...] And All That These Things And People Signify. One Sacrifices Something--for A Greater Gain In Knowledge, In Understanding, In Intensified Living? I Sometimes Wonder.

Man Has An Almost Infinite Capacity For Taking Things And People For Granted And Thereby Missing Out On The Pleasure Of Being Grateful That Things Aren't Worse And Of Praising And Thereby Lifting The Spirits Of Others.

Reality Cannot Be Ignored Except At A Price; And The Longer The Ignorance Is Persisted In, The Higher And More Terrible Becomes The Price That Must Be Paid.

Half At Least Of All Morality Is Negative And Consists In Keeping Out Of Mischief. The Lords Prayer Is Less Than 50 Words Long, And 6 Of Those Words Are Devoted To Asking God Not To Lead Us Into Temptation.

I Was Born Wandering Between Two Worlds, One Dead, The Other Powerless To Be Born, And Have Made, In A Curious Way, The Worst Of Both.

Real Orgies Are Never So Exciting As Pornographic Books. In A Volume By Pierre Louys All The Girls Are Young And Their Figures Perfect; There's No Hiccoughing Or Bad Breath, No Fatigue Or Boredom, No Sudden Recollections Of Unpaid Bills Or Business Letters Unanswered, To Interrupt The Raptures. Art Gives You The Sensation, The Thought, The Feeling Quite Pure--chemically Pure, I Mean,... Not Morally.

No Less Than War Or Statecraft, The History Of Economics Has Its Heroic Ages.

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

In Spite Of Language, In Spite Of Intelligence And Intuition And Sympathy, One Can Never Really Communicate Anything To Anybody. The Essential Substance Of Every Thought And Feeling Remains Incommunicable, Locked Up In The Impenetrable Strong-room Of The Individual Soul And Body. Our Life Is A Sentence Of Perpetual Solitary Confinement.

All Our Science Is Just A Cookery Book, With An Orthodox Theory Of Cooking That Nobody's Allowed To Question, And A List Of Recipes That Mustn't Be Added To Except By Special Permission From The Head Cook.

The Artists Who The World Has Always Recognized As The Greatest Are Those With The Widest Sympathy. The Greatness Of The Great Artist Depends Precisely On The Width And The Intensity Of His Sympathy.

Man Is So Intelligent That He Feels Impelled To Invent Theories To Account For What Happens In The World. Unfortunately, He Is Not Quite Intelligent Enough, In Most Cases, To Find Correct Explanations. So That When He Acts On His Theories, He Behaves Very Often Like A Lunatic.

Which Is Better - To Be Born Stupid Into An Intelligent Society Or Intelligent Into An Insane One?

If You Want To Be A Psychological Novelist And Write About Human Beings, The Best Thing You Can Do Is Keep A Pair Of Cats.

The Sum Of Evil, Pascal Remarked, Would Be Much Diminished If Men Could Only Learn To Sit Quietly In Their Rooms.

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.

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.

Ultimate Reality Is Not Clearly And Immediately Apprehended Except By Those Who Have Made Themselves Loving, Pure In Heart And Poor In Spirit.

Defined In Psychological Terms, A Fanatic Is A Man Who Consciously Over-compensates A Secret Doubt.

One Believes Things Because One Has Been Conditioned To Believe Them.

Brave New World Technology

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.

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Philip Jose Farmer

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