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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.

-Aldous Huxley

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Love Casts Out Fear;

Aldous Huxley

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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.

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

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

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That All Men Are Equal Is A Proposition To Which, At Ordinary Times, No Sane Human Being Has Ever Given His Assent.

I Have Spoken So Far Only Of The Blissful Visionary Experience? But Visionary Experience Is Not Always Blissful. It's Sometimes Terrible. There Is Hell As Well As Heaven.

I Write Everything Many Times Over. All My Thoughts Are Second Thoughts.

Second Thoughts

But I Don't Want Comfort. I Want God, I Want Poetry, I Want Real Danger, I Want Freedom, I Want Goodness. I Want Sin.

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The Creation By Word-power Of Something Out Of Nothing--what Is That But Magic? And, May I Add, What Is That But Literature?

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

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.

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

Happiness Is Never Grand.

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.

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

That’s What The Human Brain Is There For—to Turn The Chaos Of Given Experience Into A Set Of Manageable Symbols. Sometimes The Symbols Correspond Fairly Closely To Some Of The Aspects Of The External Reality Behind Our Experience; Then You Have Science And Common Sense. Sometimes, On The Contrary, The Symbols Have Almost No Connection With External Reality; Then You Have Paranoia And Delirium. More Often There’s A Mixture, Part Realistic And Part Fantastic; That’s Religion.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

The Spiritual Journey Does Not Consist Of Arriving At A New Destination Where A Person Gains What He Did Not Have, Or Becomes What He Is Not. It Consists In The Dissipation Of One's Own Ignorance Concerning Oneself And Life, And The Gradual Growth Of That Understanding Which Begins The Spiritual Awakening. The Finding Of God Is A Coming To One?s Self.

Assemble A Mob Of Men And Women Previously Conditioned By A Daily Reading Of The Newspapers; Treat Them To Amplified Band Music, Bright Lights...and In Next To No Time You Can Reduce Them To A State Of Almost Mindless Subhumanity. Never Before Have So Few Been In A Position To Make Fools, Maniacs, Or Criminals Of So Many.

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

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?

I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

Consciousness Is Only Possible Through Change; Change Is Only Possible Through Movement.

An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

Under The Present Dispensation, The Great Majority Of Factories Are Little Despotisms, Benevolent In Some Cases, Malevolent In Others. Even Where Benevolence Prevails, Passive Obedience Is Demanded By The Workers, Who Are Ruled By Overseers, Not Of Their Own Election, But Appointed From Above. In Theory They May Be The Subjects Of A Democratic State; But In Practice They Spend The Whole Of Their Working Lives As The Subjects Of A Petty Tyrant.

Since Mozart's Day Composers Have Learned The Art Of Making Music Throatily And Palpitatingly Sexual.

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

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.

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.

The Old Idea That Words Possess Magical Powers Is False; But Its Falsity Is The Distortion Of A Very Important Truth. Words Do Have A Magical Effect - But Not In The Way That Magicians Supposed, And Not On The Objects They Were Trying To Influence. Words Are Magical In The Way They Affect The Minds Of Those Who Use Them.

What I May Call The Messages Of Brave New World, But It Is Possible To Make People Contented With Their Servitude. I Think This Can Be Done. I Think It Has Been Done In The Past. I Think It Could Be Done Even More Effectively Now Because You Can Provide Them With Bread And Circuses And You Can Provide Them With Endless Amounts Of Distractions And Propaganda.

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Fortunately, However, Birds Don't Understand Pep Talks. Not Even St. Francis'. Just Imagine, He Went On, Preaching Sermons To Perfectly Good Thrushes And Goldfinches And Chiff-chaffs! What Presumption! Why Couldn't He Have Kept His Mouth Shut And Let The Birds Preach To Him?

The Finest Works Of Art Are Precious, Among Other Reasons, Because They Make It Possible For Us To Know, If Only Imperfectly And For A Little While, What It Actually Feels Like To Think Subtly And Feel Nobly.

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

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

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

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Asceticism, It Is Evident, Has A Double Motivation. If Men And Women Torment Their Bodies, It Is Not Only Because They Hope In This Way To Atone For Past Sins And Avoid Future Punishments; It Is Also Because They Long To Visit The Mind's Antipodes And Do Some Visionary Sightseeing.

The More A Man Knows About Himself In Relation To Every Kind Of Experience, The Greater His Chance Of Suddenly, One Fine Morning, Realizing Who In Fact He Is.

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

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

A Squat Grey Building Of Only Thirty-four Stories. Over The Main Entrance The Words, Central London Hatchery And Conditioning Centre, And, In A Shield, The World State's Motto, Community, Identity, Stability.

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

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

Universal Education Has Created An Immense Class Of What I May Call The New Stupid, Hungering For Certainty Yet Unable To Find It In The Traditional Myths And Their Rationalizations.

Liberties Are Not Given, They Are Taken.

Thought Of The Incomprehensible Sequence Of Changes And Chances That Make Up A Life, All The Beauties And Horrors And Absurdities Whose Conjunctions Create The Uninterpretable And Yet Divinely Significant Pattern Of Human Destiny.

The Pursuit Of Truth Is Just A Polite Name For The Intellectual's Favorite Pastime Of Substituting Simple And Therefore False Abstractions For The Living Complexities Of Reality.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

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

Dictators Can Always Consolidate Their Tyranny By An Appeal To Patriotism.

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.

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.

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.

We Now Spend A Good Deal More On Drink And Smoke Than We Spend On Education. This, Of Course, Is Not Surprising. The Urge To Escape From Selfhood And The Environment Is In Almost Everyone Almost All The Time.

It’s Embarrassing To Tell You This, But It Seems To Come Down Mostly To Just Learning To Be Kinder.

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.

What A Gulf Between Impression And Expression! That’s Our Ironic Fate—to Have Shakespearean Feelings And (unless By Some Billion-to-one Chance We Happen To Be Shakespeare) To Talk About Them Like Automobile Salesmen Or Teen-agers Or College Professors. We Practice Alchemy In Reverse—touch Gold And It Turns Into Lead; Touch The Pure Lyrics Of Experience, And They Turn Into The Verbal Equivalents Of Tripe And Hogwash.

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.

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

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

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

I Know The Outer World As Well As You Do, And I Judge It. You Know Nothing Of My Inner World, And Yet You Presume To Judge That World.

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

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Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

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."

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

For Some Strange Reason Murder Has Always Seemed More Respectable Than Fornication. Few People Are Shocked When They Hear God Described As The God Of Battles; But What An Outcry There Would Be If Anyone Spoke Of Him As The God Of Brothels.

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

Fate And Destiny

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.

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

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

Addiction Is An Increasing Desire For An Act That Gives Less And Less Satisfaction

Science Has Explained Nothing; The More We Know The More Fantastic The World Becomes And The Profounder The Surrounding Darkness.

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.

You've Got To Be Hurt And Upset; Otherwise You Can't Think Of The Really Good, Penetrating, X-rayish Phrases.

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.

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.

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

Medical Science

The Fact That People Are Shocked Is The Best Proof That They Need Shocking.

The Poet's Place, It Seems To Me, Is With The Mr. Hydes Of Human Nature.

In Books, The Proportion Of Exceptional To Commonplace People Is High; In Reality, Very Low.

Those Who Feel Themselves Despised Do Well To Look Despising.

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.

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.

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.

The More Powerful And Original A Mind, The More It Will Incline Towards The Religion Of Solitude.

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.

...most Men And Women Will Grow Up To Love Their Servitude And Will Never Dream Of Revolution.

To The Exponents Of The Perennial Philosophy, The Question Whether Progress Is Inevitable Or Even Real Is Not A Matter Of Primary Importance. For Them, The Important Thing Is That Individual Men And Women Should Come To The Unitive Knowledge Of The Divine Ground, And What Interests Them In Regard To The Social Environment Is Not Its Progressiveness Or Non-progressiveness (whatever Those Terms May Mean), But The Degree To Which It Helps Or Hinders Individuals In The Their Advance Towards Man's Final End.

Slowly, Very Slowly, Like Two Unhurried Compass Needles, The Feet Turned Towards The Right; North, North-east, East, South-east, South, South-south-west; Then Paused, And After A Few Seconds, Turned As Unhurriedly Back Towards The Left. South-south-west, South, South-east, East.

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

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

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

Europe Is So Well Gardened That It Resembles A Work Of Art, A Scientific Theory, A Neat Metaphysical System. Man Has Re-created Europe In His Own Image.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism - It Fulfills Our Worst Wishes. In The Person Of Our Nation We Are Able, Vicariously, To Bully And Cheat. Bully And Cheat, What's More, With A Feeling That We Are Profoundly Virtuous.

Every Man Who Knows How To Read Has It In His Power To Magnify Himself, To Multiply The Ways In Which He Exists, To Make His Life Full, Significant And Interesting.

Consider The Problem Of Over-population. Rapidly Mounting Human Numbers Are Pressing Ever More Heavily On Natural Resources. What Is To Be Done?... The Annual Increase Of Numbers Should Be Reduced. But How? We Are Given Two Choices -- Famine, Pestilence And War On The One Hand, Birth Control On The Other. Most Of Us Choose Birth Control.

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

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.

It Is Possible To Argue That The Really Influential Book Is Not That Which Converts Ten Millions Of Casual Readers, But Rather That Which Converts The Very Few Who, At Any Given Moment, Succeed In Seizing Power. Marx And Sorel Have Been Influential In The Modern World, Not So Much Because They Were Best-sellers (sorel In Particular Was Not At All A Widely Read Author), But Because Among Their Few Readers Were Two Men, Called Respectively Lenin And Mussolini.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[...] 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.

The Perennial Philosophy Is Expressed Most Succinctly In The Sanskrit Formula, Tat Tvam Asi ('that Art Thou'); The Atman, Or Immanent Eternal Self, Is One With Brahman, The Absolute Principle Of All Existence; And The Last End Of Every Human Being, Is To Discover The Fact For Himself, To Find Out Who He Really Is.

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.

And That," Put In The Director Sententiously, "that Is The Secret Of Happiness And Virtue — Liking What You've Got To Do. All Conditioning Aims At That: Making People Like Their Unescapable Social Destiny.

Brave New World

It Is Because We Don't Know Who We Are, Because We Are Unaware That The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Within Us, That We Behave In The Generally Silly, The Often Insane, The Sometimes Criminal Ways That Are So Characteristically Human. We Are Saved, We Are Liberated And Enlightened, By Perceiving The Hitherto Unperceived Good That Is Already Within Us, By Returning To Our Eternal Ground And Remaining Where, Without Knowing It, We Have Always Been.

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.

Real Progress Is Progress In Charity, All Other Advances Being Secondary Thereto.

I Met, Not Long Ago, A Young Man Who Aspired To Become A Novelist. Knowing That I Was In The Profession, He Asked Me To Tell Him How He Should Set To Work To Realize His Ambition. I Did My Best To Explain. 'the First Thing,' I Said, 'is To Buy Quite A Lot Of Paper, A Bottle Of Ink, And A Pen. After That You Merely Have To Write.'

The Deepest Sin Against The Human Mind Is To Believe Things Without Evidence.

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

Good Intentions

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

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

Single-mindedness Is All Very Well In Cows Or Baboons; In An Animal Claiming To Belong To The Same Species As Shakespeare, It Is Simply Disgraceful.

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

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

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.

Henri Iv's Feet And Armpits Enjoyed An International Reputation.

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

It Is A Bit Embarrassing To Have Been Concerned With The Human Problem All One's Life And Find At The End That One Has No More To Offer By Way Of Advice Than 'try To Be A Little Kinder.'

A Belief In Hell And The Knowledge That Every Ambition Is Doomed To Frustration At The Hands Of A Skeleton Have Never Prevented The Majority Of Human Beings From Behaving As Though Death Were No More Than An Unfounded Rumor.

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.

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.

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

Procrustes In Modern Dress, The Nuclear Scientist Will Prepare The Bed On Which Mankind Must Lie; And If Mankind Doesn’t Fit—well, That Will Be Just Too Bad For Mankind. There Will Have To Be Some Stretching And A Bit Of Amputation—the Same Sort Of Stretching And Amputations As Have Been Going On Ever Since Applied Science Really Got Going Into Its Stride, Only This Time They Will Be A Good Deal More Drastic Than In The Past. These Far From Painless Operations Will Be Directed By Highly Centralized Totalitarian Governments.

Every Ceiling, When Reached, Becomes A Floor, Upon Which One Walks As A Matter Of Course And Prescriptive Right

The Victim Of Mind-manipulation Does Not Know That He Is A Victim. To Him, The Walls Of His Prison Are Invisible, And He Believes Himself To Be Free.

The Most Shocking Fact About War Is That Its Victims And Its Instruments Are Individual Human Beings, And That These Individual Beings Are Condemned By The Monstrous Conventions Of Politics To Murder Or Be Murdered In Quarrels Not Their Own.

Finding Bad Reasons For What One Believes For Other Bad Reasons - That's Philosophy.

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

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

Religion Is Always A Patron Of The Arts, But Its Taste Is By No Means Impeccable.

The Moral Peril To Humanity Of Thoughtlessly Accepting These Conveniences [of Materialism] (with Their Inherent Disadvantages) As Constituting A Philosophy Of Life Is Now Becoming Apparent. For The Implications Of This Disruptive Materialism... Are That Human Beings Are Nothing But Bodies, Animals, Machines.

The Mockery Made Him Feel An Outsider; And Feeling An Outsider He Behaved Like One, Which Increased The Prejudice Against Him And Intensified The Contempt And Hostility Aroused By His Physical Defects. Which In Turn Increased His Sense Of Being Alien And Alone. A Chronic Fear Of Being Slighted Made Him Avoid His Equals, Made Him Stand, Where His Inferiors Were Concerned, Self-consciously On His Dignity.

Which Is Better: To Have Fun With Fungi Or To Have Idiocy With Ideology, To Have Wars Because Of Words, To Have Tomorrow's Misdeeds Out Of Yesterday's Miscreeds?

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.

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

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.

The Business Of A Seer Is To See; And If He Involves Himself In The Kind Of God-eclipsing Activities Which Make Seeing Impossible, He Betrays The Trust Which His Fellows Have Tacitly Placed In Him.

No Social Stability Without Individual Stability.

Brave New World

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

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 The Course Of History Many More People Have Died For Their Drink And Their Dope Than Have Died For Their Religion Or Their Country.

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.

And No Wonder; For The New Technique Of "subliminal Projection," As It Was Called, Was Intimately Associated With Mass Entertainment, And In The Life Of Civilized Human Beings Massed Entertainment Now Plays A Part Comparable To That Played In The Middle Ages Be Religion.

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.

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.

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.

Suppose It Were Perfectly Certain That The Life And Fortune Of Each Of Us Would Some Day Depend Upon Our Winning Or Losing A Game Of Chess. Do You Not Think That We Should All Consider It To Be Our Primary Duty To Learn At Least The Names Of The Pieces And How To Position Them On The Chessboard?

All The Advantages Of Christianity And Alcohol; None Of Their Defects.

Brave New World

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It Is In The Social Sphere, In The Realm Of Politics And Economics, That The Will To Order Becomes Really Dangerous.

A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

The Brotherhood Of Men Does Not Imply Their Equality. Families Have Their Fools And Their Men Of Genius, Their Black Sheep And Their Saints, Their Worldly Successes And Their Worldly Failures. A Man Should Treat His Brothers Lovingly And With Justice, According To The Deserts Of Each. But The Deserts Of Every Brother Are Not The Same.

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

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

If Only People Would Realize That Moral Principles Are Like Measles.... They Have To Be Caught. And Only The People Who've Got Them Can Pass On The Contagion.

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

Chronic Remorse, As All The Moralists Are Agreed, Is A Most Undesirable Sentiment. If You Have Behaved Badly, Repent, Make What Amends You Can And Address Yourself To The Task Of Behaving Better Next Time. On No Account Brood Over Your Wrongdoing. Rolling In The Muck Is Not The Best Way Of Getting Clean.

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

Of Course The Dharma-body Of The Buddha Was The Hedge At The Bottom Of The Garden. At The Same Time, And No Less Obviously, It Was These Flowers, It Was Anything That I - Or Rather The Blessed Not-i - Cared To Look At.

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 Man Who Has Successfully Solved The Problem Of His Relations With The Two Worlds Of Data And Symbols Is A Man Who Has No Beliefs. With Regard To The Problems Of Practical Life He Entertains A Series Of Working Hypotheses, Which Serve His Purposes, But Are Taken No More Seriously Than Any Other Kind Of Tool Or Instrument. In Other Words, Symbols Should Never Be Raised To The Rank Of Dogmas, Nor Should Any System Be Regarded As More Than A Provisional Convenience.

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.

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

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.

In Regard To Propaganda The Early Advocates Of Universal Literacy And A Free Press Envisaged Only Two Possibilities: The Propaganda Might Be True, Or The Propaganda Might Be False. They Did Not Foresee What In Fact Has Happened, Above All In Our Western Capitalist Democracies - The Development Of A Vast Mass Communications Industry, Concerned In The Main Neither With The True Nor The False, But With The Unreal, The More Or Less Totally Irrelevant. In A Word, They Failed To Take Into Account Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions.

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.

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.

Oh, How Desperately Bored, In Spite Of Their Grim Determination To Have A Good Time, The Majority Of Pleasure-seekers Really Are!

There Is No Bad Day That Can’t Be Overcome By Listening To A Barbershop Quartet. This Is Just Truth, Plain And Simple.

The Effects Which Follow Too Constant And Intense A Concentration Upon Evil Are Always Disastrous. Those Who Crusade, Not For God In Themselves, But Against The Devil In Others, Never Succeed In Making The World Better, But Leave It Either As It Was, Or Sometimes Even Perceptibly Worse Than It Was, Before The Crusade Began. By Thinking Primarily Of Evil We Tend, However Excellent Our Intentions, To Create Occasions For Evil To Manifest Itself.

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

You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Make You Mad.

Medical Science Has Made Such Tremendous Progress That There Is Hardly A Healthy Human Left.

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.

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

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

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.

Only One More Indispensable Massacre Of Capitalists Or Communists Or Fascists Or Christians Or Heretics, And There We Are In The Golden Future.

Modern Man's Besetting Temptation Is To Sacrifice His Direct Perceptions And Spontaneous Feelings To His Reasoned Reflections; To Prefer In All Circumstances The Verdict Of His Intellect To That Of His Immediate Intuitions.

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Carson Kressley

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