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Every Notable Advance In Technique Or Organization Has To Be Paid For, And In Most Cases The Debit Is More Or Less Equivalent To The Credit. Except Of Course When It's More Than Equivalent, As It Has Been With Universal Education, For Example, Or Wireless, Or These Damned Aeroplanes. In Which Case, Of Course, Your Progress Is A Step Backwards And Downwards.

-Aldous Huxley

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Every Notable Advance In

Aldous Huxley

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Every Notable Advance In Technique Or Organization Has To Be Paid For, And In Most Cases The Debit Is More Or Less Equivalent To The Credit. Except Of Course When It's More Than Equivalent, As It Has Been With Universal Education, For Example, Or Wireless, Or These Damned Aeroplanes. In Which Case, Of Course, Your Progress Is A Step Backwards And Downwards.

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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 .

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Two Hours. One Hundred And Twenty Minutes. Anything Might Be Done In That Time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, He Had Had Hundreds Of Hours, And What Had He Done With Them? Wasted Them, Spilt The Precious Minutes As Though His Reservoir Were Inexhaustible.

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Home, Home -- A Few Small Rooms, Stiflingly Over-inhabited By A Man, By A Periodically Teeming Woman, By A Rabble Of Boys And Girls Of All Ages. No Air, No Space; An Understerilized Prison; Darkness, Disease, And Smells.

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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.

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Words Can Be Like X-rays If You Use Them Properly -- They’ll Go Through Anything. You Read And You’re Pierced.

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...two Thirds Of All Sorrow Is Homemade And, So Far As The Universe Is Concerned, Unnecessary.

One Third, More Or Less, Of All The Sorrow That The Person I Think I Am Must Endure Is Unavoidable. It Is The Sorrow Inherent In The Human Condition, The Price We Must Pay For Being Sentient And Self-conscious Organisms, Aspirants To Liberation, But Subject To The Laws Of Nature And Under Orders To Keep On Marching, Through Irreversible Time, Through A World Wholly Indifferent To Our Well-being, Toward Decrepitude And The Certainty Of Death. The Remaining Two Thirds Of All Sorrow Is Homemade And, So Far As The Universe Is Concerned, Unnecessary.

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.

Given The Nature Of Spiders, Webs Are Inevitable. And Given The Nature Of Human Beings, So Are Religions. Spiders Can't Help Making Fly-traps, And Men Can't Help Making Symbols. That's What The Human Brain Is There For - The Turn The Chaos Of Given Experience Into A Set Of Manageable Symbols.

But A Priest's Life Is Not Supposed To Be Well-rounded; It Is Supposed To Be One-pointed - A Compass, Not A Weathercock.

Higher Education Is Not Necessarily A Guarantee Of Higher Virtue.

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

The Poet Is Born With The Capacity Of Arranging Words In Such A Way That Something Of The Quality Of The Graces And Inspirations He Has Received Can Make Itself Felt To Other Human Beings In The White Spaces, So To Speak, Between The Lines Of His Verse. This Is A Great And Precious Gift; But If The Poet Remains Content With His Gift, If He Persists In Worshipping The Beauty In Art And Nature Without Going On To Make Himself Capable, Through Selflessness, Of Apprehending Beauty As It Is In The Divine Ground, Then He Is Only An Idolater.

The Indispensible Is Not Necessarily The Desirable.

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.

Liberate Yourselves From Everything You Know And Look With Complete Innocence At This Infinitely Improbable Thing Before You.

A Majority Of Young People Seem To Develop Mental Arteriosclerosis Forty Years Before They Get The Physical Kind.

As Late As The Seventeenth Century, Monarchs Owned So Little Furniture That They Had To Travel From Palace To Palace With Wagon-loads Of Plate And Bedspreads, Of Carpets And Tapestries.

Those Who Feel Themselves Despised Do Well To Look Despising.

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.

Folly Is Often More Cruel In The Consequences Than Malice Can Be In The Intent.

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.

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Society Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted.

Man Must Learn To Simplify, But Not To The Point Of Falsification.

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.

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

Every Individual Is At Once The Beneficiary And The Victim Of The Linguistic Tradition Into Which He Has Been Born.

What Man Has Joined, Nature Is Powerless To Put Asunder.

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Nobody Can Have The Consolations Of Religion Or Philosophy Unless He Has First Experienced Their Desolations.

I Think That Fiction And, As I Say, History And Biography Are Immensely Important, Not Only For Their Own Sake, Because They Provide A Picture Of Life Now And Of Life In The Past, But Also As Vehicles For The Expression Of General Philosophic Ideas, Religious Ideas, Social Ideas.

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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.

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

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No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

For Every Traveller Who Has Any Taste Of His Own, The Only Useful Guidebook Will Be The One Which He Himself Has Written.

I Know Very Dimly When I Start What's Going To Happen. I Just Have A Very General Idea, And Then The Thing Develops As I Write.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

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God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

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Plasticene And Self-expression Will Not Solve The Problems Of Education. Nor Will Technology And Vocational Guidance; Nor The Classics And The Hundred Best Books.

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.

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

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.

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

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The Most Intractable Of Our Experiences Is The Experience Of Time-the Intuition Of Duration, Combined With The Thought Of Perpetual Perishing.

I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

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

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.

In Any Race Between Human Numbers And Natural Resources, Time Is Against Us.

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

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

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

Blood Of The World, Time Staunchless Flows; The Wound Is Mortal And Is Mine.

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

Now, A Corpse, Poor Thing, Is An Untouchable And The Process Of Decay Is, Of All Pieces Of Bad Manners, The Vulgarest Imaginable. For A Corpse Is, By Definition, A Person Absolutely Devoid Of Savoir Vivre.

Man Is Hypnotized By The Glitter Of His Own Gadgetry

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."

You Can't Make Flivers Without Steel - And You Can't Make Tragedies Without Social Instability. The World's Stable Now. People Are Happy; They Get What They Want, And They Never Want What They Can't Get. They're Well Off; They're Safe; They're Never Ill; They're Not Afraid Of Death; They're Blissfully Ignorant Of Passion And Old Age; They're Plagued With No Mothers Or Fathers; They've Got No Wives, Or Children, Or Lovers To Feel Strongly About; They're So Conditioned That They Pratically Can't Help Behaving As They Ought To Behave.

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

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.

Experience Teaches Only The Teachable.

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

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

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.

If Human Beings Were Shown What They're Really Like, They'd Either Kill One Another As Vermin, Or Hang Themselves.

If You Have Behaved Badly, Repent, Make What Amends You Can And Address Yourself To The Task Of Behaving Better Next Time.

Brave New World

An Ideal Is Merely The Projection, On An Enormously Enlarged Scale, Of Some Aspect Of Personality.

A Bad Book Is As Much Of A Labor To Write As A Good One, It Comes As Sincerely From The Author's Soul.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's A Little Embarrassing That After 45 Years Of Research & Study, The Best Advice I Can Give People Is To Be A Little Kinder To Each Other.

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.

Every Significant Artist Is A Metaphysician, A Propounder Of Beauty-truths And Form-theories.

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.

Happiness Is Not Achieved By The Conscious Pursuit Of Happiness; It Is Generally The By-product Of Other Activities.

The Really Important Facts Were That Spatial Relationships Had Ceased To Matter Very Much And That My Mind Was Perceiving The World In Terms Of Other Than Spatial Categories. At Ordinary Times The Eye Concerns Itself With Such Problems As Where? — How Far? — How Situated In Relation To What? 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 Critics Don't Interest Me Because They're Concerned With What's Past And Done, While I'm Concerned With What Comes Next.

Dying Is Almost The Least Spiritual Of Our Acts, More Strictly Carnal Even Than The Act Of Love. There Are Death Agonies That Are Like The Strainings Of The Costive At Stool.

Complete Prohibition Of All Chemical Mind Changers Can Be Decreed, But Cannot Be Enforced, And Tends To Create More Evils Than It Cures.

Happiness Is A Hard Master, Particularly Other People's Happiness.

By Comparison With A Night-club, Churches Are Positively Gay.

The Soul Of Wit May Become The Very Body Of Untruth. However Elegant And Memorable, Brevity Can Never, In The Nature Of Things, Do Justice To All The Facts Of A Complex Situations. On Such A Theme One Can Be Brief Only By Omission And Simplification. Omission And Simplification Help Us To Understand - But Help Is, In Many Cases, To Understand The Wrong Thing; For Our Comprehension May Be Only Of The Abbreviator's Neatly Formulated Notions, Not Of The Vast, Ramifying Reality From Which These Notions Have Been So Arbitrarily Abstracted.

Grace Is Always Sufficient, Provided We Are Ready To Cooperate With It. If We Fail To Do Our Share, But Rather Choose To Rely On Self-will And Self-direction, We Shall Not Only Get No Help From The Graces Bestowed On Us, We Shall Actually Make It Impossible For Further Graces To Be Given.

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.

Everyone Thinks This Way At Some Point. The Important Thing Is To Power Through And Get To Learning. If You Really Don't Have The Time Let Me Handle Your Analytics.

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

To Be Shaken Out Of The Ruts Of Ordinary Perception, To Be Shown For A Few Timeless Hours The Outer And The Inner World, Not As They Appear To An Animal Obsessed With Words And Notions, But As They Are Apprehended, Directly And Unconditionally, By Mind At Large-this Is The Experience Of Inestimable Value To Everyone.

To Be Enlightened Is To Be Aware, Always, Of Total Reality In Its Immanent Otherness - To Be Aware Of It And Yet Remain In A Condition To Survive As An Animal. Our Goal Is To Discover That We Have Always Been Where We Ought To Be. Unhappily We Make The Task Exceedingly Difficult For Ourselves.

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

Brave New World

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

I'm Pretty Good At Inventing Phrases - You Know, The Sort Of Words That Suddenly Make You Jump, Almost As Though You'd Sat On A Pin, They Seem So New And Exciting Even Though They're About Something Hypnopaedically* Obvious. But That Doesn't Seem Enough. It's Not Enough For The Phrases To Be Good; What You Make With Them Ought To Be Good Too.

... The Greater Part Of The Population Is Not Very Intelligent, Dreads Responsibility, And Desires Nothing Better Than To Be Told What To Do. Provided The Rulers Do Not Interfere With Its Material Comforts And Its Cherished Beliefs, It Is Perfectly Happy To Let Itself Be Ruled.

Most Ignorances Are Vincible, And In The Greater Number Of Cases Stupidity Is What The Buddha Pronounced It To Be, A Sin. For, Consciously, Or Subconsciously, It Is With Deliberation That We Do Not Know Or Fail To Understand-because Incomprehension Allows Us, With A Good Conscience, To Evade Unpleasant Obligations And Responsibilities, Because Ignorance Is The Best Excuse For Going On Doing What One Likes, But Ought Not, To Do.

Experience Is Not What Happens To You; It's What You Do With What Happens To You.

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.

There Was A Thing Called Heaven; But All The Same They Used To Drink Enormous Quantities Of Alcohol.

Enormous Quantities

Faith, It Is Evident, May Be Relied On To Produce Sustained Action And, More Rarely, Sustained Contemplation.

When One Individual Comes Into Intimate Contact With Another, She—or He, Of Course, As The Case May Be—must Almost Inevitably Receive Or Inflict Suffering.

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.

The More Stitches, The Less Riches.

Brave New World

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

Words Are Good Servants But Bad Masters.

There Are So Many Intellectual And Moral Angels Battling For Rationalism, Good Citizenship, And Pure Spirituality; So Many And Such Eminent Ones, So Very Vocal And Authoritative! The Poor Devil In Man Needs All The Support And Advocacy He Can Get. The Artist Is His Natural Champion. When An Artist Deserts To The Side Of The Angels, It Is The Most Odious Of Treasons.

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.

The Older Dictators Fell Because They Could Never Supply Their Subjects With Enough Bread, Enough Circuses, Enough Miracles, And Mysteries. Under A Scientific Dictatorship, Education Will Really Work' With The Result That Most Men And Women Will Grow Up To Love Their Servitude And Will Never Dream Of Revolution. There Seems To Be No Good Reason Why A Thoroughly Scientific Dictatorship Should Ever Be Overthrown.

The Quality Of Moral Behavior Varies In Inverse Ratio To The Number Of Human Beings Involved.

Civilization Means Food And Literature All Round. Beefsteaks And Fiction Magazines For All. First-class Proteins For The Body, Fourth-class Love-stories For The Spirit.

Good Action And Thoughts Produce Consequences Which Tend To Neutralize, Or Put A Stop To, The Result Of Evil Thoughts And Actions. For As We Give Up The Life Of Self (and Note That, Like Forgiveness, Repentance And Humility Are Also Special Cases Of Giving), As We Abandon What The German Mystics Called "the I, Me, Mine," We Make Ourselves Progressively Capable Of Receiving Grace. By Grace We Are Enabled To Know Reality More Completely, And This Knowledge Of Reality Helps Us To Give Up More Of The Life Of Selfhood - And So On, In A Mounting Spiral Of Illumination And Regeneration.

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

We Can Only Love What We Know, And We Can Never Know Completely What We Do Not Love. Love Is A Mode Of Knowledge

In A Few Years, No Doubt, Marriage Licences Will Be Sold Like Dog Licences, Good For 12 Months.

We Don't Want To Change. Every Change Is A Menace To Stability.

There Is Something Curiously Boring About Somebody Else's Happiness.

If Humans Were In Fact The Members Of A Truly Social Species, And If Their Individual Differences Were Trifling And Could Be Completely Ironed Out By Appropriate Conditioning, Then, Obviously, There Would Be No Need For Liberty And The State Would Be Justified In Persecuting The Heretics Who Demanded It.

Individual Differences

Like Every Man Of Sense And Good Feeling, I Abominate Work.

A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

From The Internal Reality, By Which I Means The Totality Of Psychological Experiences, It [science] Actually Separates Us. Art, For Example, Deals With Many More Aspects Of This Internal Reality Than Does Science, Which Confines Itself Deliberately And By Convention To The Study Of One Very Limited Class Of Experiences The Experiences Of Sense.

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Letitia Elizabeth Landon

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