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Perhaps Dirt Is The Necessary Condition Of Beauty.... Perhaps Hygiene And Art Can Never Be Bedfellows. No Verdi, After All, Without Spitting Into Trumpets. No Duse Without A Crowd Of Malodorous Bourgeois Giving One Another Their Coryzas. And Think Of The Inexpugnable Retreats For Microbes Prepared By Michelangelo In The Curls Of Moses' Beard!

-Aldous Huxley

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Perhaps Dirt Is The

Aldous Huxley

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Perhaps Dirt Is The Necessary Condition Of Beauty.... Perhaps Hygiene And Art Can Never Be Bedfellows. No Verdi, After All, Without Spitting Into Trumpets. No Duse Without A Crowd Of Malodorous Bourgeois Giving One Another Their Coryzas. And Think Of The Inexpugnable Retreats For Microbes Prepared By Michelangelo In The Curls Of Moses' Beard!

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

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

Art And Religion, Carnivals And Saturnalia, Dancing And Listening To Oratory - All These Have Served, In H. G. Wells's Phrase, As Doors In The Wall.

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.

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

The Present Moment Is The Only Aperture Through Which The Soul Can Pass Out Of Time Into Eternity, Through Which Grace Can Pass Out Of Eternity Into The Soul, And Through Which Love Can Pass From One Soul In Time To Another Soul In Time.

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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.

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

I Think We Have To Prepare The Mind In One Way Or Another To Accept The Great Uprush Or Downrush, Whichever You Like To Call It, Of The Greater Non-self.

Books Have Their Destinies Like Men. And Their Fates, As Made By Generations Of Readers, Are Very Different From The Destinies Foreseen For Them By Their Authors. Gulliver's Travels, With A Minimum Of Expurgation, Has Become A Children's Book; A New Illustrated Edition Is Produced Every Christmas. That's What Comes Of Saying Profound Things About Humanity In Terms Of A Fairy Story.

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

Higher Education Is Not Necessarily A Guarantee Of Higher Virtue.

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

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 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.

Sunsets And Death; Death And Therefore Kisses, Kisses And Consequently Birth And Then Death For Yet Another Generation Of Sunset Watchers.

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)

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

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

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

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

Within The Next Generation I Believe That The World's Leaders Will Discover That Infant Conditioning And Narco-hypnosis Are More Efficient, As Instruments Of Government, Than Clubs And Prisons, And That The Lust For Power Can Be Just As Completely Satisfied By Suggesting People Into Loving Their Servitude As By Flogging Them And Kicking Them Into Obedience.

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.

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

I Was Not Looking Now At An Unusual Flower Arrangement. I Was Seeing What Adam Had Seen On The Morning Of His Creation - The Miracle, Moment By Moment, Of Naked Existence.

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.

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

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

This Concern With The Basic Condition Of Freedom -- The Absence Of Physical Constraint -- Is Unquestionably Necessary, But Is Not All That Is Necessary. It Is Perfectly Possible For A Man To Be Out Of Prison And Yet Not Free -- To Be Under No Physical Constraint And Yet To Be A Psychological Captive, Compelled To Think, Feel And Act As The Representatives Of The National State, Or Of Some Private Interest Within The Nation, Want Him To Think, Feel And Act.

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.

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.

Let Us Be Kinder To One Another.

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.

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.

Good Is That Which Makes For Unity. Evil Is That Which Makes For Separateness.

Amour Is The One Human Activity Of Any Importance In Which Laughter And Pleasure Preponderate, If Ever So Slightly, Over Misery And Pain.

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

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

A Mind That Has Come To The Stillness Of Wisdom Shall Know Being, Shall Know What It Is To Love. Love Is Neither Personal Nor Impersonal. Love Is Love, Not To Be Defined Or Described By The Mind As Exclusive Or Inclusive. Love Is Its Own Eternity; It Is The Real, The Supreme, The Immeasurable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Advertisement Is One Of The Most Interesting And Difficult Of Modern Literary Forms.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Facts Are Ventriloquist’s Dummies. Sitting On A Wise Man’s Knee They May Be Made To Utter Words Of Wisdom; Elsewhere, They Say Nothing, Or Talk Nonsense, Or Indulge In Sheer Diabolism.

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

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

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.

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

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

Liberties Are Not Given, They Are Taken.

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

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

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

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

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

Brave New World Technology

No Social Stability Without Individual Stability.

Brave New World

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

Given A Fair Chance, Human Beings Can Govern Themselves, And Govern Themselves Better

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

Fate And Destiny

"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.

Today We Are Faced, I Think, With The Approach Of What May Be Called The Ultimate Revolution, The Final Revolution, Where Man Can Act Directly On The Mind-body Of His Fellows.

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.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

Thought Is Barred In This City Of Dreadful Joy And Conversation Is Unknown.

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.

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.

Parodies And Caricatures Are The Most Penetrating Of Criticisms.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Ending Is Better Than Mending.

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

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

Along This Particular Stretch Of Line No Express Had Ever Passed. All The Trains--the Few That There Were--stopped At All The Stations. Denis Knew The Names Of Those Stations By Heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich For Timpany, West Bowlby, And, Finally, Camlet-on-the-water.

‎"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.

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

The Nature Of Power Is Such That Even Those Who Have Not Sought It, But Have Had It Forced Upon Them, Tend To Acquire A Taste For More.

Marble, I Perceive, Covers A Multitude Of Sins.

It's With Bad Sentiments That One Makes Good Novels.

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.

To Those Who Think That Liberty Is A Good Thing, And That It May Someday Be Possible For People To Live In A Society Fit For Free, Fully Human Individuals, A Thorough Education In The Nature Of Language, Its Uses And Abuses, Seems Indispensable.

Generalities Are Intellectually Necessary Evils.

An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

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.

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

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

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 Idol, However Exalted, Turns Out, In The Long Run, To Be A Moloch, Hungry For Human Sacrifice.

I Wanted To Change The World. But I Have Found That The Only Thing One Can Be Sure Of Changing Is Oneself.

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

It's A Very Salutary Thing To Realize That The Rather Dull Universe In Which Most Of Us Spend Most Of Our Time Is Not The Only Universe There Is. I Think It's Healthy That People Should Have This Experience.

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.

Every Man's Memory Is His Private Literature.

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

We Are So Anxious To Achieve Some Particular End That We Never Pay Attention To The Psycho-physical Means Whereby That End Is To Be Gained. So Far As We Are Concerned, Any Old Means Is Good Enough. But The Nature Of The Universe Is Such That Ends Can Never Justify The Means. On The Contrary, The Means Always Determine The End.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

The 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.

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.

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

Man Is An Amphibian Who Lives Simultaneously In Two Worlds-the Given And The Home-made, The World Of Matter, Life And Consciousness And The World Of Symbols.

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

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.

To Write Fiction, One Needs A Whole Series Of Inspirations About People In An Actual Environment, And Then A Whole Lot Of Work On The Basis Of Those Inspirations.

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

Medical Science

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.

Words Are Good Servants But Bad Masters.

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.

Can We Unite Against Ourselves For Our Own Higher Interest?

Knowledge Is Porportionate To Being... You Know In Virtue Of What You Are.

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.

If It Were Not For The Intellectual Snobs Who Pay - In Solid Cash - The Arts Would Perish With Their Starving Practitioners. Let Us Thank Heaven For Hypocrisy.

The Goal In Life Is To Discover That You’ve Always Been Where You Were Supposed To Be.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The More You Know, The More You See

Conversations With God

People Often Ask Me What Is The Most Effective Technique For Transforming Their Life. It Is A Little Embarrassing That After Years And Years Of Research And Experimentation, I Have To Say That The Best Answer Is - Just Be A Little Kinder.

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.'

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

In The World Of Ideas Everything Was Clear; In Life All Was Obscure, Embroiled.

God Isn't The Son Of Memory; He's The Son Of Immediate Experience. You Can't Worship A Spirit In Spirit, Unless You Do It Now. Wallowing In The Past May Be Good Literature. As Wisdom, It's Hopeless. Time Regained Is Paradise Lost, And Time Lost Is Paradise Regained. Let The Dead Bury Their Dead. If You Want To Live At Every Moment As It Presents Itself, You've Got To Die To Every Other Moment.

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

Craving For Power Is Not A Vice Of The Body, Consequently It Knows None Of The Limitations Imposed By A Tired Or Satiated Physiology Upon Gluttony, Intemperance And Lust

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.

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

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

Happiness Is Never Grand.

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.

For What We Think And Feel And Are Is To A Great Extent Determined By The State Of Our Ductless Glands And Our Viscera.

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.

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

The Greater A Man's Talents, The Greater His Power To Lead Astray.

Brave New World

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

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.

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.

All That Is Needed Is Money And A Candidate Who Can Be Coached To Look Sincere. Political Principles And Plans For Specific Action Have Come To Lose Most Of Their Importance. The Personality Of The Candidate, The Way He Is Projected By The Advertising Experts, Are The Things That Really Matter.

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

Jehovah, Allah, The Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, Are Names For A Great Variety Of Human Virtues, Human Mystical Experiences, Human Remorses, Human Compensatory Fantasies, Human Terrors, Human Cruelties. If All Men Were Alike, All The World Would Worship The Same God.

When Life Appears To Be Working Against You, When Your Luck Is Down, When The Supposedly Wrong People Show Up, Or When You Slip Up And Return To Old, Self-defeating Habits, Recognize The Signs That You're Out Of Harmony With Intention.

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.

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

A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

What Wonder, Then, If Human Beings In Their Search For The Divine Have Generally Preferred To Look Within!

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.

Actual Happiness Always Looks Pretty Squalid In Comparison With The Overcompensations For Misery. And, Of Course, Stability Isn't Nearly So Spectacular As Instability. And Being Contented Has None Of The Glamour Of A Good Fight Against Misfortune, None Of The Picturesqueness Of A Struggle With Temptation, Or A Fatal Overthrow By Passion Or Doubt. Happiness Is Never Grand.

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

All Conditioning Aims At That: Making People Like Their Inescapable Social Destiny.

Brave New World

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.

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.

For Particulars, As Everyone Knows, Make For Virtue And Happiness; Generalities Are Intellectually Necessary Evils. Not Philosophers But Fretsawyers And Stamp Collectors Compose The Backbone Of Society.

Brave New World

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

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

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

Men Make Use Of Their Illnesses At Least As Much As They Are Made Use Of By Them.

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

The Most Valuable Of All Education Is The Ability To Make Yourself Do The Thing You Have To Do, When It Has To Be Done, Whether You Like It Or Not.

Procrastination

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.

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.

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

One Seventh Of Your Life Is Spent On Monday.

Most Ignorance Is Vincible Ignorance. We Don't Know Because We Don't Want To Know.

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

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