Background Image

...

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.

-Aldous Huxley

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

There Are Confessable Agonies,

Aldous Huxley

...

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.

Views: 11

Topic

More From Aldous Huxley

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

So Long As Men Worship The Caesars And Napoleons, Caesars And Napoleons Will Duly Arise And Make Them Miserable.

Assembled In A Crowd, People Lose Their Powers Of Reasoning And Their Capacity For Moral Choice.

One Of The Great Triumphs Of The Nineteenth Century Was To Limit The Connotation Of The Word "immoral" In Such A Way That, For Practical Purposes, Only Those Were Immoral Who Drank Too Much Or Made Too Copious Love. Those Who Indulged In Any Or All Of The Other Deadly Sins Could Look Down In Righteous Indignation On The Lascivious And The Gluttonous.... In The Name Of All Lechers And Boozers I Most Solemnly Protest Against The Invidious Distinction Made To Our Prejudice.

Morality Is Always The Product Of Terror; Its Chains And Strait-waistcoats Are Fashioned By Those Who Dare Not Trust Others, Because They Dare Not Trust Themselves, To Walk In Liberty.

All Of Us Desire A Better State Of Society. But Society Cannot Become Better Before Two Great Tasks Are Performed.unless Peace Can Be Firmly Established And The Prevailing Obsession With Money And Power Profoundly Modified, There Is No Hope Of Any Desirable Change Being Made.

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.

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

From Their Experience Or From The Recorded Experience Of Others (history), Men Learn Only What Their Passions And Their Metaphysical Prejudices Allow Them To Learn.

Words Play An Enormous Part In Our Lives And Are Therefore Deserving Of The Closest Study.

[...] 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.

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

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

Most Loverspicture To Themselves, In Their Mistresses, A Secret Reality, Beyond And Different From What They See Every Day. They Are In Love With Somebody Else--their Own Invention. And Sometimes There Is A Secret Reality; And Sometimes Reality And Appearance Are The Same. The Discovery, In Either Case, Is Likely To Cause A Shock.

Parodies And Caricatures Are The Most Penetrating Of Criticisms.

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.

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.

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

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

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

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

War Is Often Described As A Law Of Nature-this Is Not True: Among The Lower Animals, War Is Unknown.

We Live Together, We Act On, And React To One Another; But Always, And In All Circumstances, We Are By Ourselves.

Doors Of Perception

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

Ironically Enough, The Only People Who Can Hold Up Indefinitely Under The Stress Of Modern War Are Psychotics. Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity.

"our Kingdom Go" Is The Necessary And Unavoidable Corollary Of 'thy Kingdom Come.' For The More There Is Self, The Less There Is Of God. The Divine Eternal Fulness Of Life Can Be Gained Only By Those Who Have Deliberately Lost The Partial, Separative Life Of Craving And Self-interest, Of Egocentric Thinking, Feeling, Wishing, And Acting.

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

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

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!

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.

At This Very Moment,... The Most Frightful Horrors Are Taking Place In Every Corner Of The World. People Are Being Crushed, Slashed, Disembowelled, Mangled; Their Dead Bodies Rot And Their Eyes Decay With The Rest. Screams Of Pain And Fear Go Pulsing Through The Air At The Rate Of Eleven Hundred Feet Per Second. After Travelling For Three Seconds They Are Perfectly Inaudible. These Are Distressing Facts; But Do We Enjoy Life Any The Less Because Of Them? Most Certainly We Do Not.

Civilization Is Sterilization.

And There's Always Soma To Calm Your Anger, To Reconcile You To Your Enemies, To Make You Patient And Long-suffering. In The Past, You Could Only Accomplish These Things By Making A Great Effort And After Years Of Hard Moral Training. Now, You Swallow Two Or Three Half-gramme Tablets, And There You Are. Anybody Can Be Virtuous Now. You Can Carry At Least Half Your Morality About In A Bottle. Christianity Without Tears-that's What Soma Is.

Brave New World

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

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.

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.

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

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

Brave New World

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.

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

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

In Regard To Man's Final End, All The Higher Religions Are In Complete Agreement. The Purpose Of Human Life Is The Discovery Of Truth, The Unitive Knowledge Of The Godhead.

The Survival Of Democracy Depends On The Ability Of Large Numbers Of People To Make Realistic Choices In The Light Of Adequate Information.

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.

...wordless Conditioning Is Crude And Wholesale; Cannot Bring Home The Finer Distinctions, Cannot Inculcate The More Complex Courses Of Behavior. For That There Must Be Words, But Words Without Reason... Not So Much Like Drops Of Water, Though Water, It Is True, Can Wear Holes In The Hardest Granite; Rather, Drops Of Liquid Sealing-wax, Drops That Adhere, Encrust, Incorporate Themselves With What They Fall On, Till Finally The Rock Is All One Scarlet Blob.

In Religion All Words Are Dirty Words. Anybody Who Gets Eloquent About Buddha, Or God, Or Christ, Ought To Have His Mouth Washed Out With Carbolic Soap.

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.

The Natural Rhythm Of Human Life Is Routine Punctuated By Orgies.

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

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

To Be Excited Is Still To Be Unsatisfied.

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

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?

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.

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

Brave New World

I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

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.

A Physical Shortcoming Could Produce A Kind Of Mental Excess. The Process, It Seemed, Was Reversible. Mental Excess Could Produce, For Its Own Purposes, The Voluntary Blindness And Deafness Of Deliberate Solitude, The Artificial Impotence Of Asceticism.

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

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

There Is Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That's Your Own Self.

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

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.

Sleep Is The Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces.

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

At Their First Appearance Innovators Have Always Been Derided As Fools And Mad Men.

God: A Gaseous Vertebrate.

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.'

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

Doing Your Best

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

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

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?

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

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.

Culture Is Like The Sum Of Special Knowledge That Accumulates In Any Large United Family And Is The Common Property Of All Its Members. When We Of The Great Culture Family Meet, We Exchange Reminiscences About Grandfather Homer, And That Awful Old Dr. Johnson, And Aunt Sappho, And Poor Johnny Keats.

The Critics Don't Interest Me Because They're Concerned With What's Past And Done, While I'm Concerned With What Comes Next.

Like Every Other Good Thing In This World, Leisure And Culture Have To Be Paid For. Fortunately, However, It Is Not The Leisured And The Cultured Who Have To Pay.

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

Industrial Civilization Is Only Possible When There's No Self-denial. Self-indulgence Up To The Very Limits Imposed By Hygiene And Economics. Otherwise The Wheels Stop Turning.

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

To Travel Is To Discover That Everyone Is Wrong About Other Countries.

Impulse Arrested Spills Over, And The Flood Is Feeling, The Flood Is Passion, The Flood Is Even Madness: It Depends On The Force Of The Current, The Height And Strength Of The Barrier. The Unchecked Stream Flows Smoothly Down Its Appointed Channels Into A Calm Well Being.

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.

The Surest Way To Work Up A Crusade In Favor Of Some Good Cause Is To Promise People They Will Have A Chance Of Maltreating Someone. To Be Able To Destroy With Good Conscience, To Be Able To Behave Badly And Call Your Bad Behavior 'righteous Indignation' — This Is The Height Of Psychological Luxury, The Most Delicious Of Moral Treats.

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

The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

A Large City Cannot Be Experientially Known; Its Life Is Too Manifold For Any Individual To Be Able To Participate In It.

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

One Seventh Of Your Life Is Spent On Monday.

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

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

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.

Hinduism The Perennial Philosophy That Is At The Core Of All Religions.

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.'

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 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.

The Real Hopeless Victims Of Mental Illness Are To Be Found Among Those Who Appear To Be Most Normal. Many Of Them Are Normal Because They Are So Well Adjusted To Our Mode Of Existence, Because Their Human Voice Has Been Silenced So Early In Their Lives That They Do Not Even Struggle Or Suffer Or Develop Symptoms As The Neurotic Does. They Are Normal Not In What May Be Called The Absolute Sense Of The Word; They Are Normal Only In Relation To A Profoundly Abnormal Society.

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.

Brave New World

Everybody Strains After Happiness, And The Result Is That Nobody's Happy.

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.

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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

All War Propaganda Consists, In The Last Resort, In Substituting Diabolical Abstractions For Human Beings. Similarly, Those Who Defend War Have Invented A Pleasant Sounding Vocabulary Of Abstractions In Which To Describe The Process Of Mass Murder.

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

No Romeo-and-juliet Acts, No Nonsense About Love With A Large L, None Of That Popular Song Claptrap With Its Skies Of Blue, Dreams Come True, Heaven With You. Just Sensuality For Its Own Sake.

God In The Safe And Ford On The Shelves.

Brave New World

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.

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.

We Cannot Reason Ourselves Out Of Our Basic Irrationality. All We Can Do Is To Learn The Art Of Being Irrational In A Reasonable Way.

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

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Dislike And Even Actually Dread All Notions With Which They Are Not Familiar... Hence It Comes About That At Their First Appearance Innovators Have Generally Been Persecuted, And Always Derided As Fools And Madmen.

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

Armaments, Universal Debt, And Planned Obsolescence - Those Are The Three Pillars Of Western Prosperity. If War, Waste, And Moneylenders Were Abolished, You'd Collapse. And While You People Are Overconsuming The Rest Of The World Sinks More And More Deeply Into Chronic Disaster.

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

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.

Almost All Of Us Long For Peace And Freedom; But Very Few Of Us Have Much Enthusiasm For The Thoughts, Feelings, And Actions That Make For Peace And Freedom.

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.

The Flower Of The Present Rosily Blossomed.

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

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

An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

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.

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.

I Like Being Myself. Myself And Nasty.

Brave New World Happiness

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

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.

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.

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.

You All Remember, I Suppose, That Beautiful And Inspired Saying Of Our Ford's: History Is Bunk.

Brave New World

There Will Be, In The Next Generation Or So, A Pharmacological Method Of Making People Love Their Servitude, And Producing Dictatorship Without Tears, So To Speak, Producing A Kind Of Painless Concentration Camp For Entire Societies, So That People Will In Fact Have Their Liberties Taken Away From Them, But Will Rather Enjoy It.

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth. By Simply Not Mentioning Certain Subjects... Totalitarian Propagandists Have Influenced Opinion Much More Effectively Than They Could Have By The Most Eloquent Denunciations.

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

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

The Question Of The Next Generation Will Not Be One Of How To Liberate The Masses, But Rather, How To Make Them Love Their Servitude.

Every Ceiling Reached Becomes A Floor.

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.

Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

Did You Eat Something That Didn't Agree With You?" Asked Bernard. The Savage Nodded "i Ate Civilization.

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.

Hitler's Vast Propaganda Successes Were Accomplished With Little More Than The Radio And Loudspeaker, And Without Tv And Tape And Video Recording . . . Today The Art Of Mind Control Is In The Process Of Becoming A Science.

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.

Only Times And Places, Only Names And Ghosts.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our Vanity Makes Us Exaggerate The Importance Of Human Life; The Individual Is Nothing; Nature Cares Only For The Species.

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.

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

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.

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

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

These Are The Sort Of Things People Ought To Look At. Things Without Pretensions, Satisfied To Be Merely Themselves.

All Urbanization, Pushed Beyond A Certain Point, Automatically Becomes Suburbanization.... Every Great City Is Just A Collection Of Suburbs. Its Inhabitantsdo Not Live In Their City; They Merely Inhabit It.

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.

But Every One Belongs To Every One Else

Brave New World

Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

When The Sun Rises, It Rises For Everyone.

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

Each Person Is At Each Moment Capable Of Remembering All That Has Ever Happened To Him And Of Perceiving Everything That Is Happening Everywhere In The Universe.

Doors Of Perception

In The Course Of Evolution Nature Has Gone To Endless Trouble To See That Every Individual Is Unlike Every Other Individual....physically And Mentally, Each One Of Us Is Unique. Any Culture Which, In The Interests Of Efficiency Or In The Name Of Some Political Or Religious Dogma, Seeks To Standardize The Human Individual, Commits An Outrage Against Man's Biological Nature.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

All That Happens Means Something; Nothing You Do Is Ever Insignificant.

In Real Life There Is No Such Person As The Average Man.

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.

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.

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.

Habit Converts Luxurious Enjoyments Into Dull And Daily Necessities.

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.

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

Let Us Be Kinder To One Another.

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

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

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

Our Business Is To Wake Up. We Have To Find Ways In Which To Detect The Whole Of Reality In The One Illusory Part Which Our Self-centered Consciousness Permits Us To See. We Must Not Live Thoughtlessly, Taking Our Illusion For The Complete Reality, But At The Same Time We Must Not Live Too Thoughtfully In The Sense Of Trying To Escape From The Dream State. We Must Be Continuously On Watch For Ways In Which We May Enlarge Our Consciousness.

Wherever We Turn We Find That The Real Obstacles To Peace Are Human Will And Feeling, Human Convictions, Prejudices, Opinions. If We Want To Get Rid Of War We Must Get Rid First Of All Of Its Psychological Causes. Only When This Has Been Done Will The Rulers Of The Nations Even Desire To Get Rid Of The Economic And Political Causes.

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

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

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.

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.

The Inconveniences And Horrors Of The Pox Are Perfectly Well Known To Every One; But Still The Disease Flourishes And Spreads. Several Million People Were Killed In A Recent War And Half The World Ruined; But We All Busily Go On In Courses That Make Another Event Of The Same Sort Inevitable. Experientia Docet? Experientia Doesn't.

Trending Author

Daphne Guinness

Wilford Brimley

Sebastian Junger

Brigitte Bardot

Category