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It's Dark Because You Are Trying Too Hard. Lightly Child, Lightly. Learn To Do Everything Lightly. Yes, Feel Lightly Even Though You're Feeling Deeply. Just Lightly Let Things Happen And Lightly Cope With Them. So Throw Away Your Baggage And Go Forward. There Are Quicksands All About You, Sucking At Your Feet, Trying To Suck You Down Into Fear And Self-pity And Despair. That's Why You Must Walk So Lightly. Lightly My Darling.

-Aldous Huxley

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It's Dark Because You

Aldous Huxley

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It's Dark Because You Are Trying Too Hard. Lightly Child, Lightly. Learn To Do Everything Lightly. Yes, Feel Lightly Even Though You're Feeling Deeply. Just Lightly Let Things Happen And Lightly Cope With Them. So Throw Away Your Baggage And Go Forward. There Are Quicksands All About You, Sucking At Your Feet, Trying To Suck You Down Into Fear And Self-pity And Despair. That's Why You Must Walk So Lightly. Lightly My Darling.

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The Rush To Books And Universities Is Like The Rush To The Public House. People Want To Drown Their Realization Of The Difficulties Of Living Properly In This Grotesque Contemporary World, They Want To Forget Their Own Deplorable Inefficiency As Artists In Life.

Did You Ever Feel, As Though You Had Something Inside You That Was Only Waiting For You To Give It A Chance To Come Out? Some Sort Of Extra Power That You Aren't Using - You Know, Like All The Water That Goes Down The Falls Instead Of Through The Turbines?

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Too Much Consistency Is As Bad For The Mind As For The Body.

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

The Course Of Every Intellectual, If He Pursues His Journey Long And Unflinchingly Enough, Ends In The Obvious, From Which The Non-intellectuals Have Never Stirred.

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

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

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

Unless We Choose To Decentralize And To Use Applied Science, Not As The End To Which Human Beings Are To Be Made The Means, But As The Means To Producing A Race Of Free Individuals, We Have Only Two Alternatives To Choose From: Either A Number Of National

To Be Excited Is Still To Be Unsatisfied.

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

And So, Resisting The Temptation To Wallow In Artistic Remorse, I Prefer To Leave Both Well And Ill Alone And To Think About Something Else

He Had Been Making An Unsuccessful Effort To Write Something About Nothing In Particular

Good Is A Product Of The Ethical And Spiritual Artistry Of Individuals; It Cannot Be Mass-produced.

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.

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.

In Actual Life A Downward Movement May Sometimes Be Made The Beginning Of An Ascent.

I Am Ignorant And Impotent And Yet, Somehow Or Other, Here I Am, Unhappy, No Doubt, Profoundly Dissatisfied ... In Spite Of Everything I Survive.

At This Point We Find Ourselves Confronted By A Very Disquieting Question: Do We Really Wish To Act Upon Our Knowledge?

Chastity - The Most Unnatural Of All The Sexual Perversions.

The Consistent Thinker, The Consistently Moral Man, Is Either A Walking Mummy Or Else, If He Has Not Succeeded In Stifling All His Vitality, A Fanatical Monomaniac.

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

Teaching Is The Last Refuge Of Feeble Minds With A Classical Education.

Beware Of Being Too Rational. In The Country Of The Insane, The Integrated Man Doesn't Become King. He Gets Lynched.

Round Pegs In Square Holes Tend To Have Dangerous Thoughts About The Social System And Tend To Infect Others With Their Discontents.

All Right Then," Said The Savage Defiantly, "i'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

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Champagne Had The Taste Of An Apple Peeled With A Steel Knife.

Experience Teaches Only The Teachable.

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

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

Deprived Of Their Newspapers Or A Novel, Reading-addicts Will Fall Back Onto Cookery Books, On The Literature Which Is Wrapped Around Bottles Of Patent Medicine, On Those Instructions For Keeping The Contents Crisp Which Are Printed On The Outside Of Boxes Of Breakfast Cereals. On Anything.

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

A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

To Make This Trivial World Sublime, Take Half A Gram Of Phanerothyme.

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.

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

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

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.

Proportion ... You Can't Help Thinking About It In These London Streets, Where It Doesn't Exist ... It's Like Listening To A Symphony Of Cats To Walk Along Them. Senseless Discords And A Horrible Disorder All The Way ... We Need No Barbarians From Outside; They're On The Premises, All The Time.

I'd Rather Be Myself," He Said. "myself And Nasty. Not Somebody Else, However Jolly.

Brave New World Technology

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.

There Is No Substitute For Talent. Industry And All Its Virtues Are Of No Avail.

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.

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 Don't Think There Is Any Incompatibility Between Science And Mysticism . . . Immanent Religion Is The Only Form Of Religion In Which There Is No Conflict At All, That I Can See, Between Science And Religion.

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

Most Vices Demand Considerable Self-sacrifices. There Is No Greater Mistake Than To Suppose That A Vicious Life Is A Life Of Uninterrupted Pleasure. It Is A Life Almost As Wearisome And Painful -- If Strenuously Led -- As Christian's In The Pilgrim's Progress.

Beauty Is Worse Than Wine, It Intoxicates Both The Holder And Beholder.

The Scent Organ Was Playing A Delightfully Refreshing Herbal Capriccio - Rippling Arpeggios Of Thyme And Lavender, Of Rosemary, Basil, Myrtle, Tarragon; A Series Of Daring Modulations Through The Spice Keys Into Ambergris; And A Slow Return Through Sandalwood, Camphor, Cedar And Newmown Hay (with Occasional Subtle Touches Of Discord - A Whiff Of Kidney Pudding, The Faintest Suspicion Of Pig's Dung) Back To The Simple Aromatics With Which The Piece Began. The Final Blast Of Thyme Died Away; There Was A Round Of Applause; The Lights Went Up.

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

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

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

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The Ductless Glands Secrete Among Other Things Our Moods, Our Aspirations, Our Philosophy Of Life.

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.

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.

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

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An Intellectual Is A Person Who's Found One Thing That's More Interesting Than Sex.

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.

Every Civilization Is, Among Other Things, An Arrangement For Domesticating The Passions And Setting Them To Do Useful Work.

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.

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.

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[i Am Not] The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

Fate And Destiny

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.

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The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

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Never Have So Many Been Manipulated So Much By So Few.

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[...] Technology Has Tended To Devaluate The Traditional Vision-inducing Materials. The Illumination Of A City, For Example, Was Once A Rare Event, Reserved For Victories And National Holidays, For The Canonization Of Saints And The Crowning Of Kings. Now It Occurs Nightly And Celebrates The Virtues Of Gin, Cigarettes And Toothpaste.

Results Only Come To Those Who Master The Paradoxical Art Of Doing And Not Doing, Of Letting Go As A Person In Order That The Immanent And Transcendent Unknown Quantity May Take Hold. We Cannot Make Ourselves Understand; The Most We Can Do Is To Foster A State Of Mind In Which Understanding May Come To Us.

No Man Ever Dared To Manifest His Boredom So Insolently As Does A Siamese Tomcat When He Yawns In The Face Of His Amorously Importunate Wife.

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 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.

Habit Converts Luxurious Enjoyments Into Dull And Daily Necessities.

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.

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

Words Are Magical In The Way They Affect The Minds Of Those Who Use Them.

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.

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

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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.

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

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

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.

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

The Legs, For Example, Of That Chair--how Miraculous Their Tubularity, How Supernatural Their Polished Smoothness! I Spent Several Minutes--or Was It Several Centuries?--not Merely Gazing At Those Bamboo Legs, But Actually Being Them---or Rather Being Myself In Them; Or, To Be Still More Accurate (for "i" Was Not Involved In The Case, Nor In A Certain Sense Were "they") Being My Not-self In The Not-self Which Was The Chair.

Such Prosperity As We Have Known It Up To The Present Is The Consequence Of Rapidly Spending The Planet's Irreplaceable Capital.

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

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.

But Then People Don't Read Literature In Order To Understand; They Read It Because They Want To Re-live The Feelings And Sensations Which They Found Exciting In The Past. Art Can Be A Lot Of Things; But In Actual Practice, Most Of It Is Merely The Mental Equivalent Of Alcohol And Cantharides.

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth.

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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.

Orthodoxy Is The Diehard Of The World Of Thought. It Learns Not, Neither Can It Forget.

I Dread The Inevitable Acceleration Of American World Domination Which Will Be The Result Of It All...europe Will No Longer Be Europe.

It Had The Taste Of An Apple Peeled With A Steel Knife. (sebastian Barnack Assessing A Roederer 1916 Champagne In Time Must Have A Stop)

So Now You Can Let Go, My Darling...let Go...let Go Of This Poor Old Body. You Don't Need It Anymore. Let It Fall Away From You. Leave It Lying There Like A Pile Of Worn-out Clothes...go On, My Darling, Go On Into The Light, Into The Peace, Into The Living Peace Of The Clear Light.

Those Who Believe That They Are Exclusively In The Right Are Generally Those Who Achieve Something.

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.

Reality, However Utopian, Is Something From Which People Feel The Need Of Taking Pretty Frequent Holidays.

Brave New World

The Essay Is A Literary Device For Saying Almost Everything About Almost Anything

Literary Devices

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.

Life Is Short And Information Endless: Nobody Has Time For Everything

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

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

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.

There Is Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That Is Your Own Self. So You Have To Begin There, Not Outside, Not On Other People. That Comes Afterwards, When You Have Worked On Your Own Corner.

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

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.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

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.

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

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.

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.

Proverbs Are Always Platitudes Until You Have Personally Experienced The Truth Of Them.

A Really Efficient Totalitarian State Would Be One In Which The All-powerful Executive Of Political Bosses And Their Army Of Managers Control A Population Of Slaves Who Do Not Have To Be Coerced, Because They Love Their Servitude.

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A Man May Have Strong Humanitarian And Democratic Principles, But If He Happens To Have Been Brought Up As A Bath-taking, Shirt-changing Lover Of Fresh Air, He Will Have To Overcome Certain Physical Repugnance Before He Can Bring Himself To Put Those Principles Into Practice.

That Men Do Not Learn Very Much From The Lessons Of History Is The Most Important Of All The Lessons Of History.

Suddenly To Realise That One Is Sitting, Damned, Among The Other Damned--it Is A Most Disquieting Experience; So Disquieting Thatmost Of Us React To It By Immediately Plunging More Deeply Into Our Particular Damnation In The Hope, Generally Realized, That We May Be Able, At Least For A Time, To Stifle Our Revolutionary Knowledge.

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

Medical Science

Most Human Beings Have An Almost Infinite Capacity For Taking Things For Granted.

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.

Civilization Is Sterilization.

A Poor Degenerate From The Ape, Whose Hands Are Four, Whose Tail's A Limb, I Contemplate My Flaccid Shape And Know I May Not Rival Him Save With My Mind.

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.

Happiness Has Got To Be Paid For. You're Paying For It, Mr. Watson–paying Because You Happen To Be Too Much Interested In Beauty. I Was Too Much Interested In Truth; I Paid Too.

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Compared With That Of Taoists And Far Eastern Buddhists, The Christian Attitude Toward Nature Has Been Curiously Insensitive And Often Downright Domineering And Violent. Taking Their Cue From An Unfortunate Remark In Genesis, Catholic Moralists Have Regarded Animals As Mere Things Which Men Do Right To Regard For Their Own Ends. . . .

Contemplation Is That Condition Of Alert Passivity, In Which The Soul Lays Itself Open To The Divine Ground Within And Without, The Immanent And Transcendent Godhead.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

Hug Me Till You Drug Me, Honey; Kiss Me Till I'm In A Coma.

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Death Is The Only Thing We Haven't Succeeded In Completely Vulgarizing.

Those Who Feel Themselves Despised Do Well To Look Despising.

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

Both Of Us Victims Of The Same Twentieth-century Plague. Not The Black Death, This Time; The Gray Life.

All Gods Are Homemade, And It Is We Who Pull Their Strings, And So, Give Them The Power To Pull Ours.

Those Who Meant Well Behaved In The Same Way As Those Who Meant Badly.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

Hamlet And Ophelia

People Travel For The Same Reason As They Collect Works Of Art: Because The Best People Do It.

Generalized Intelligence And Mental Alertness Are The Most Powerful Enemies Of Dictatorship And At The Same Time The Basic Conditions Of Effective Democracy.

If You Don't Gamble, You'll Never Win.

One Cubic Centimeter Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments.

The Nature Of Oratory Is Such That There Has Always Been A Tendency Among Politicians And Clergymen To Oversimplify Complex Matters. From A Pulpit Or A Platform Even The Most Conscientious Of Speakers Finds It Very Difficult To Tell The Whole Truth.

In The Contexts Of Religion And Politics, Words Are Not Regarded As Standing, Rather Inadequately, For Things And Events; On The Contrary Things And Events Are Regarded As Particular Illustrations Of Words.

Religion And Politics

An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

Speed, It Seems To Me, Provides The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure.

Where Beauty Is Worshipped For Beauty's Sake As A Goddess, Independent Of And Superior To Morality And Philosophy, The Most Horrible Putrefaction Is Apt To Set In. The Lives Of The Aesthetes Are The Far From Edifying Commentary On The Religion Of Beauty.

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?

The Leech's Kiss, The Squid's Embrace, The Prurient Ape's Defiling Touch: And Do You Like The Human Race? No, Not Much.

Alpha Children Wear Grey. They Work Much Harder Than We Do, Because They're So Frightfully Clever. I'm Awfully Glad I'm A Beta, Because I Don't Work So Hard. And Then We Are Much Better Than The Gammas And Deltas. Gammas Are Stupid. They All Wear Green, And Delta Children Wear Khaki. Oh No, I Don't Want To Play With Delta Children. And Epsilons Are Still Worse. They're Too Stupid To Be Able To Read Or Write. Besides They Wear Black, Which Is Such A Beastly Color. I'm So Glad I'm A Beta.

Wild Inside; Raging, Writhing—yes, "writhing" Was The Word, Writhing With Desire. But Outwardly He Was Hopelessly Tame; Outwardly—baa, Baa, Baa.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Books.

To Travel Is To Discover That Everybody Is Wrong. The Philosophies, The Civilizations Which Seem, At A Distance, So Superior To Those Current At Home, All Prove On A Close Inspection To Be In Their Own Way Just As Hopelessly Imperfect.

When People Are Suspicious With You, You Start Being Suspicious With Them.

Brave New World Happiness

If The Men Of The Middle Ages... Lived In Filth And Discomfort, It Was Not For Any Lack Of Ability To Change Their Mode Of Life; It Was Because They Chose To Live This Way, Because Filth And Discomfort Fitted In With Their Principles And Prejudices, Political, Moral, And Religious.... It Was In The Power Of Medieval... Craftsmen To Create Armchairs And Sofas That Might Have Rivaled In Comfort Those Of Today

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 .

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

I Used To Think I Had No Will To Power. Now I Perceive That I Vented It On Thoughts, Rather Than People. Conquering An Unknown Province Of Knowledge. Getting The Better Of A Problem. Forcing Ideas To Associate Or Come Apart. Bullying Recalcitrant Words To Assume A Certain Pattern. All The Fun Of Being A Dictator Without Any Risks And Responsibilities.

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

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.

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

Eating, Drinking, Dying - Three Primary Manifestations Of The Universal And Impersonal Life. Animals Live That Impersonal And Universal Life Without Knowing Its Nature. Ordinary People Know Its Nature But Don't Live It And, If They Think Seriously About It, Refuse To Accept It. An Enlightened Person Knows It, Lives It, And Accepts It Completely. He Eats, He Drinks, And In Due Course He Dies - But He Eats With A Difference, Drinks With A Difference, Dies With A Difference.

No Social Stability Without Individual Stability.

Brave New World

The Worst Enemy Of Life, Freedom And The Common Decencies Is Total Anarchy; Their Second Worst Enemy Is Total Efficiency.

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

If We Must Play The Theological Game, Let Us Never Forget That It Is A Game. Religion, It Seems To Me, Can Survive Only As A Consciously Accepted System Of Make-believe.

We Objected To The Morality Because It Interfered With Our Sexual Freedom.

Meaninglessness

Bondage Is The Life Of Personality, And For Bondage The Personal Self Will Fight With Tireless Resourcefulness And The Most Stubborn Cunning.

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.

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

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

Doing Your Best

"all Right Then," Said The Savage Defiantly, I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy." "not To Mention The Right To Grow Old And Ugly And Impotent; The Right To Have Syphilis And Cancer; The Right To Have Too Little To Eat, The Right To Be Lousy; The Right To Live In Constant Apprehension Of What May Happen Tomorrow; The Right To Catch Typhoid; The Right To Be Tortured By Unspeakable Pains Of Every Kind." There Was A Long Silence. "i Claim Them All," Said The Savage At Last.

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

Men Have Always Been A Prey To Distractions, Which Arethe Original Sins Of The Mind; But Never Before Today Has An Attempt Been Made To Organize And Exploit Distractions, To Make Of Them, Because Of Their Economic Importance, The Core And Vital Center Of Human Life, To Idealize Them As The Highest Manifestations Of Mental Activity. Ours Is An Age Of Systematized Irrelevances, And The Imbecile Within Us Has Become One Of The Titans, Upon Whose Shoulders Rests The Weight Of The Social And Economic System

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Societies Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted. The Luminous Ceiling Toward Which We Raise Our Longing Eyes Becomes, When We Have Climbed To The Next Floor, A Stretch Of Disregarded Linoleum Beneath Our Feet.

‎"but That's The Price We Have To Pay For Stability. You've Got To Choose Between Happiness And What People Used To Call High Art. We've Sacrificed The High Art.

Brave New World

I've Never Discussed My Writing With Others Much, But I Don't Believe It Can Do Any Harm. I Don't Think That There's Any Risk That Ideas Or Materials Will Evaporate.

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

Science Is Not Enough, Religion Is Not Enough, Art Is Not Enough, Politics And Economics Are Not Enough, Nor Is Love, Nor Is Duty, Nor Is Action However Disinterested, Nor, However Sublime, Is Contemplation. Nothing Short Of Everything, Will Really Do.

My Father Considered A Walk Among The Mountains As The Equivalent Of Churchgoing.

We Shall Be Permitted To Live On This Planet Only For As Long As We Treat All Nature With Compassion And Intelligence.

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.

The Impulse To Cruelty Is, In Many People, Almost As Violent As The Impulse To Sexual Love - Almost As Violent And Much More Mischievous.

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

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.

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

People Intoxicate Themselves With Work So They Won't See How They Really Are.

Drinking Can Not Be Sacramentalised Except In Religions Which Set No Store On Decorum. The Worship Of Dionysos Or The Celtic God Of Beer Was A Loud And Disorderly Affair.

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.

Most Of One's Life Is One Prolonged Effort To Prevent Oneself Thinking.

Consistency Is Contrary To Nature, Contrary To Life. The Only Completely Consistent People Are Dead.

A Life-worshipper's Philosophy Is Comprehensive. He Is At One Moment A Positivist And At Another A Mystic: Now Haunted By The Thought Of Death And Now A Dionysian Child Of Nature; Now A Pessimist And Now, With A Change Of Lover Or Liver Or Even The Weather, An Exuberant Believer That God's In His Heaven And All's Right With The World.

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

This Really Revolutionary Revolution Is To Be Achieved, Not In The External World, But In The Souls And Flesh Of Human Beings.

Pageantry Is A Visionary Art Which Has Been Used, From Time Immemorial, As A Political Instrument.

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.

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

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.

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