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Something That Had Been A Single Cell, A Cluster Of Cells, A Little Sac Of Tissue, A Kind Of Worm, A Potential Fish With Gills, Stirred In Her Womb And Would One Day Become A Man--a Grown Man, Suffering And Enjoying, Loving And Hating, Thinking, Remembering, Imagining. And What Had Been A Blob Of Jelly Within Her Body Would Invent A God And Worship; What Had Been A Kind Of Fish Would Create, And, Having Created, Would Become The Battleground Of Disputing Good And Evil; What Had Blindly Lived In Her As A Parasitic Worm Would Look At The Stars, Would Listen To Music, Would Read Poetry.

-Aldous Huxley

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Something That Had Been

Aldous Huxley

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Something That Had Been A Single Cell, A Cluster Of Cells, A Little Sac Of Tissue, A Kind Of Worm, A Potential Fish With Gills, Stirred In Her Womb And Would One Day Become A Man--a Grown Man, Suffering And Enjoying, Loving And Hating, Thinking, Remembering, Imagining. And What Had Been A Blob Of Jelly Within Her Body Would Invent A God And Worship; What Had Been A Kind Of Fish Would Create, And, Having Created, Would Become The Battleground Of Disputing Good And Evil; What Had Blindly Lived In Her As A Parasitic Worm Would Look At The Stars, Would Listen To Music, Would Read Poetry.

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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.

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.

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

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

To His Dog, Every Man Is Napoleon; Hence The Constant Popularity Of Dogs.

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

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

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.

You Got Rid Of Them. Yes, That’s Just Like You. Getting Rid Of Everything Unpleasant Instead Of Learning To Put Up With It. Whether ‘tis Better In The Mind To Suffer The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune, Or To Take Arms Against A Sea Of Troubles And By Opposing End Them… But You Don’t Do Either. Neither Suffer Nor Oppose. You Just Abolish The Slings And Arrows. It’s Too Easy.

Experience Teaches Only The Teachable.

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

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

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.

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

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Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

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.

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

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

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

Well... ...that's What You Always Forget, Isn't It? I Mean, You Forget To Pay Attention To What's Happening. And That's The Same As Not Being Here And Now.

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.

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

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

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One Cubic Centimeter Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments.

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Procrastination

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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.

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

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Experience Is Not A Matter Of Having Actually Swum The Hellespont, Or Danced With The Dervishes, Or Slept In A Doss-house. It Is A Matter Of Sensibility And Intuition, Of Seeing, And Hearing The Significant Thing, Of Paying Attention At The Right Moments, Of Understanding And Coordinating. Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man; It Is What A Man Does With What Happens To Him.

Significant Things

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After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest To Expressing The Inexpressible Is Music.

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Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

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.

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

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

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

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.

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Individual Differences

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Literary Or Scientific, Liberal Or Specialist, All Our Education Is Predominantly Verbal And Therefore Fails To Accomplish What It Is Supposed To Do. Instead Of Transforming Children Into Fully Developed Adults, It Turns Out Students Of The Natural Sciences Who Are Completely Unaware Of Nature As The Primary Fact Of Experience, It Inflicts Upon The World Students Of The Humanities Who Know Nothing Of Humanity, Their Own Or Anyone Else's.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

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

The Indispensible Is Not Necessarily The Desirable.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The More Stitches, The Less Riches.

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

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

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.

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

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.

But The Quiet Grows And Grows. Beautifully And Unbearably.

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.

Being Cared For When One Is Dead Is Less Satisfactory Than Being Cared For When One Is Alive.

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

Medical Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Family, Monogamy, Romance. Everywhere Exclusiveness, A Narrow Channelling Of Impulse And Energy.

Indifference To All The Refinements Of Life--it's Really Shocking. Just Calvinism, That's All. Calvinism Without The Excuse Of Calvin's Theology.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Snapshots Had Become Almost As Dim As Memories.

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!

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

I Have Discovered The Most Exciting, The Most Arduous Literary Form Of All, The Most Difficult To Master, The Most Pregnant In Curious Possibilities. I Mean The Advertisement. It Is Far Easier To Write Ten Passably Effective Sonnets, Good Enough To Take In The Not Too Inquiring Critic, Than One Effective Advertisement That Will Take In A Few Thousand Of The Uncritical Buying Public.

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

There Isn't Any Formula Or Method. You Learn To Love By Loving - By Paying Attention And Doing What One Thereby Discovers Has To Be Done.

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.

When The Sun Rises, It Rises For Everyone.

There Are Few Who Would Not Rather Be Taken In Adultery Than In Provocation.

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

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

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.

My Fate Cannot Be Mastered; It Can Only Be Collaborated With And Thereby, To Some Extent, Directed. Nor Am I The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

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

Art Is One Of The Means Whereby Man Seeks To Redeem A Life Which Is Experienced As Chaotic, Senseless, And Largely Evil.

Thanks To Words, We Have Been Able To Rise Above The Brutes; And Thanks To Words, We Have Often Sunk To The Level Of The Demons.

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

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.

The Third Petition Of The Lord's Prayer Is Repeated Daily By Millions Who Have Not The Slightest Intention Of Letting Anyone's Will Be Done But Their Own.

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.

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

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

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

Specialized Meaninglessness Has Come To Be Regarded, In Certain Circles, As A Kind Of Hallmark Of True Science.

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.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

Hamlet And Ophelia

Every Ceiling Reached Becomes A Floor.

One Of The Principal Functions Of A Friend Is To Suffer (in A Milder And Symbolic Form) The Punishments That We Should Like, But Are Unable, To Inflict Upon Our Enemies.

Brave New World

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?

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.

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.

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

Abused As We Abuse It At Present, Dramatic Art Is In No Sense Cathartic; It Is Merely A Form Of Emotional Masturbation. It Is The Rarest Thing To Find A Player Who Has Not Had His Character Affected For The Worse By The Practice Of His Profession. Nobody Can Make A Habit Of Self-exhibition, Nobody Can Exploit His Personality For The Sake Of Exercising A Kind Of Hypnotic Power Over Others, And Remain Untouched By The Process.

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.

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 .

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Several Excuses Are Always Less Convincing Than One.

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

Brave New World

The History Of Any Nation Follows An Undulatory Course. In The Trough Of The Wave We Find More Or Less Complete Anarchy; But The Crest Is Not More Or Less Complete Utopia, But Only, At Best, A Tolerably Humane, Partially Free And Fairly Just Society That Invariably Carries Within Itself The Seeds Of Its Own Decadence.

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.

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

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

I Know Quite Well That One Needs Ridiculous, Mad Situations Like That; One Can't Write Really Well About Anything Else. Why Was That Old Fellow Such A Marvelous Propaganda Technician? Because He Had So Many Insane, Excruciating Things To Get Excited About. You've Got To Be Hurt And Upset; Otherwise You Can't Think Of The Really Good, Penetrating, X-rayish Phrases.

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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

Dream In A Pragmatic Way.

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

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.

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

Peace Is A Necessary Condition Of Spirituality, No Less Than An Inevitable Result Of It.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Brave New World

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Brave New World Happiness

Brave New World Freedom

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

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.

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

Fate And Destiny

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

Enormous Quantities

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

Brave New World Happiness

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.

It Takes A Certain Amount Of Intelligence And Imagination To Realize The Extraordinary Queerness And Mysteriousness Of The World In Which We Live.

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