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You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

-Aldous Huxley

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You Never See Animals

Aldous Huxley

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You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

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The Sum Of Evil, Pascal Remarked, Would Be Much Diminished If Men Could Only Learn To Sit Quietly In Their Rooms.

You Never See Animals Going Through The Absurd And Often Horrible Fooleries Of Magic And Religion. . . . Dogs Do Not Ritually Urinate In The Hope Of Persuading Heaven To Do The Same And Send Down Rain. Asses Do Not Bray A Liturgy To Cloudless Skies. Nor Do Cats Attempt, By Abstinence From Cat's Meat, To Wheedle The Feline Spirits Into Benevolence. Only Man Behaves With Such Gratuitous Folly. It Is The Price He Has To Pay For Being Intelligent But Not, As Yet, Quite Intelligent Enough.

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

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A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy.

Home, Home -- A Few Small Rooms, Stiflingly Over-inhabited By A Man, By A Periodically Teeming Woman, By A Rabble Of Boys And Girls Of All Ages. No Air, No Space; An Understerilized Prison; Darkness, Disease, And Smells.

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

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

To Talk About Religion Except In Terms Of Human Psychology Is An Irrelevance.

We Live Together, We Act On, And React To, One Another; But Always And In All Circumstances We Are By Ourselves. [...] By Its Very Nature Every Embodied Spirit Is Doomed To Suffer And Enjoy In Solitude. Sensations, Feelings, Insights, Fancies - All These Are Private And, Except Through Symbols And At Second Hand, Incommunicable.

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

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

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

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 Older Dictators Fell Because They Could Never Supply Their Subjects With Enough Bread, Enough Circuses, Enough Miracles, And Mysteries. Under A Scientific Dictatorship, Education Will Really Work' With The Result That Most Men And Women Will Grow Up To Love Their Servitude And Will Never Dream Of Revolution. There Seems To Be No Good Reason Why A Thoroughly Scientific Dictatorship Should Ever Be Overthrown.

Nobody Needs To Go Anywhere Else. We Are All, If We Only Knew It, Already There. If I Only Knew Who In Fact I Am, I Should Cease To Behave As What I Think I Am; And If I Stopped Behaving As What I Think I Am, I Should Know Who I Am. What In Fact I Am, If Only The Manichee I Think I Am Would Allow Me To Know It, Is The Reconciliation Of Yes And No Lived Out In Total Acceptance And The Blessed Experience Of Not-two. 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.

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

It Is Delightful To Read On The Spot The Impressions And Opinions Of Tourists Who Visited A Hundred Years Ago, In The Vehicles And With The Aesthetic Prejudices Of The Period, The Places Which You Are Visiting Now. The Voyage Ceases To Be A Mere Tour Through Space; You Travel Through Time And Thought As Well.

Happiness Is Like Coke — Something You Get As A By-product In The Process Of Making Something Else.

The Man Who Comes Back Through The Door In The Wall Will Never Be Quite The Same As The Man Who Went Out. He Will Be Wiser But Less Sure, Happier But Less Self-satisfied, Humbler In Acknowledging His Ignorance Yet Better Equipped To Understand The Relationship Of Words To Things, Of Systematic Reasoning To The Unfathomable Mystery Which It Tries, Forever Vainly, To Comprehend

I Know Very Dimly When I Start What's Going To Happen. I Just Have A Very General Idea, And Then The Thing Develops As I Write.

The 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.

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

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.

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

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

And Along With Indifference To Space, There Was An Even More Complete Indifference To Time. "there Seems To Be Plenty Of It", Was All I Would Answer When The Investigator Asked Me To Say What I Felt About Time. Plenty Of It, But Exactly How Much Was Entirely Irrelevant. I Could, Of Course, Have Looked At My Watch But My Watch I Knew Was In Another Universe. My Actual Experience Had Been, Was Still, Of An Indefinite Duration. Or Alternatively, Of A Perpetual Present Made Up Of One Continually Changing Apocalypse.

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

As Late As The Seventeenth Century, Monarchs Owned So Little Furniture That They Had To Travel From Palace To Palace With Wagon-loads Of Plate And Bedspreads, Of Carpets And Tapestries.

I'm Claiming The Right To Be Unhappy.

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.

People Will Insist On Treating The Mons Veneris As Though It Were Mount Everest. Too Silly!

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.

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

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

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

In Life, Man Proposes, God Disposes.

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

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

Can We Unite Against Ourselves For Our Own Higher Interest?

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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

Second Thoughts

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

Brave New World

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

No Holiday Is Ever Anything But A Disappointment.

God In The Safe And Ford On The Shelves.

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

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

Your True Traveller Finds Boredom Rather Agreeable Than Painful. It Is The Symbol Of His Liberty - His Excessive Freedom. He Accepts His Boredom, When It Comes, Not Merely Philosophically, But Almost With Pleasure.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Lion Will Lay Down With The Lamb...but Every Morning They'll Have To Provide A New Lamb. Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

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

"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.

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.

Maybe This World Is Another Planet's Hell.

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

To Be Well Informed, One Must Read Quickly A Great Number Of Merely Instructive Books. To Be Cultivated, One Must Read Slowly And With A Lingering Appreciation The Comparatively Few Books That Have Been Written By Men Who Lived, Thought, And Felt With Style.

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

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

The Instinct Of Acquisitiveness Has More Perverts, I Believe, Than The Instinct Of Sex. At Any Rate, People Seem To Me Odder About Money Than About Even Their Amours.

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

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

If You Want To Write, Keep Cats.

The Really Important Facts Were That Spatial Relationships Had Ceased To Matter Very Much And That My Mind Was Perceiving The World In Terms Of Other Than Spatial Categories. At Ordinary Times The Eye Concerns Itself With Such Problems As Where? — How Far? — How Situated In Relation To What? In The Mescaline Experience The Implied Questions To Which The Eye Responds Are Of Another Order. Place And Distance Cease To Be Of Much Interest. The Mind Does Its Perceiving In Terms Of Intensity Of Existence, Profundity Of Significance, Relationships Within A Pattern.

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.

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.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

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

In All Activities Of Life, The Secret Of Efficiency Lies In An Ability To Combine Two Seemingly Incompatible States: A State Of Maximum Activity And A State Of Maximum Relaxation.

Habit Converts Luxurious Enjoyments Into Dull And Daily Necessities.

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

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

Man Approaches The Unattainable Truth Through A Succession Of Errors.

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.

Liberty, As We All Know, Cannot Flourish In A Country That Is Permanently On A War Footing, Or Even A Near War Footing. Permanent Crisis Justifies Permanent Control Of Everybody And Everything By The Agencies Of Central Government.

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

It Is Only When We Have Renounced Our Preoccupation With "i," "me," "mine," That We Can Truly Possess The World In Which We Live. Everything, Provided That We Regard Nothing As Property. And Not Only Is Everything Ours; It Is Also Everybody Else's.

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

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.

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!

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

Applied Science Is A Conjuror, Whose Bottomless Hat Yields Impartially The Softest Of Angora Rabbits And The Most Petrifying Of Medusas.

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.

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

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.

For The Born Traveller, Travelling Is A Besetting Vice. Like Other Vices, It Is Imperious, Demanding Its Victim's Time, Money, Energy And The Sacrifice Of Comfort.

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.

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

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

Individual Insanity Is Immune To The Consequences Of Collective Insanity

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

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

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An Unexciting Truth May Be Eclipsed By A Thrilling Lie.

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.

Nothing Short Of Everything Will Really Do.

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.

...two Thirds Of All Sorrow Is Homemade And, So Far As The Universe Is Concerned, Unnecessary.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Primroses And Landscapes, He Pointed Out, Have One Grave Defect: They Are Gratuitous. A Love Of Nature Keeps No Factories Busy. It Was Decided To Abolish The Love Of Nature, At Any Rate Among The Lower Classes. . . . It Was Essential That They Should Keep On Going To The Country, Even Though They Hated It.

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.

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

And What Strange Voices They Have! Sometimes Like The Complaining Of Small Children; Sometimes Like The Noise Of Lambs.

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

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

Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man; It Is What A Man Does With What Happens To Him. It Is A Gift For Dealing With The Accidents Of Existence, Not The Accidents Themselves.

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.

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

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.

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

Work Is Prayer. Work Is Also Stink. Therefore Stink Is Prayer.

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

Silence Is As Full Of Potential Wisdom And Wit As The Unshown Marble Of Great Sculpture. The Silent Bear No Witness Against Themselves.

Of The Significant And Pleasurable Experiences Of Life Only The Simplest Are Open Indiscriminately To All. The Rest Cannot Be Had Except By Those Who Have Undergone A Suitable Training.

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.

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

If You Look Up 'intelligence' In The New Volumes Of The Encyclopeadia Britannica, You'll Find It Classified Under The Following Three Heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My Stepfather's A Perfect Specimen Of Intelligence, Military.

Every Gain Made By Individuals Or Society Is Almost Instantly Taken For Granted.

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.

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

We Don't Want To Change. Every Change Is A Menace To Stability.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

You Should Hurry Up And Acquire The Cigar Habit. It's One Of The Major Happinesses. And So Much More Lasting Than Love, So Much Less Costly In Emotional Wear And Tear.

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

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.

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

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

Visionary Experience Is Not The Same As Mystical Experience. Mystical Experience Is Beyond The Realm Of Opposites. Visionary Experience Is Still Within That Realm. Heaven Entails Hell, And 'going To Heaven' Is No More Liberation Than Is The Descent Into Horror. Heaven Is Merely A Vantage Point From Which The Divine Ground Can Be More Clearly Seen Than On The Level Of Ordinary Individual Experience.

Mystical Experiences

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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

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.

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.

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

Brave New World Happiness

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

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

My Sympathies Are, Of Course, With The Government Side, Especially The Anarchists ; For Anarchism Seems To Me More Likely To Lead To Desirable Social Change Than Highly Centralized, Dictatorial Communism .

We Lie To Ourselves In Order That We May Still Have The Excuse Of Ignorance, The Alibi Of Stupidity And Incomprehension, Possessing Which We Can Continue With A Good Conscience To Commit And Tolerate The Most Monstrous Crimes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If One's Different, One's Bound To Be Lonely.

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

But Every One Belongs To Every One Else

Brave New World

Brave New World John

Brave New World Technology

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

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.

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

The Optimum Population Is Modeled On The Iceberg- Eight-ninths Below The Water Line, One-ninth Above.

Brave New World

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Most Kings And Priests Have Been Despotic, And All Religions Have Been Riddled With Superstition.

Words Are Good Servants But Bad Masters.

A Man Can Smile And Smile And Be A Villain.

Hamlet And Ophelia

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

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.

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

Happiness Is Never Grand.

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

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.

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

Brave New World

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

Experience Teaches Only The Teachable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What The Rest Of Us See Only Under The Influence Of Mescalin, The Artist Is Congenitally Equipped To See All The Time.

I Had Motives For Not Wanting The World To Have Meaning; Consequently Assumed That It Had None, And Was Able Without Any Difficulty To Find Satisfying Reasons For This Assumption ... For Myself, As No Doubt, For Most Of My Contemporaries, The Philosophy Of Meaninglessness Was Essentially An Instrument Of Liberation. The Liberation We Desired Was Simultaneous Liberation From A Certain Political And Economic System, And Liberation From A Certain System Of Morality. We Objected To The Morality Because It Interfered With Our Sexual Freedom.

The Social Body Persists Although The Component Cells May Change.

The Pleasures Of Ignorance Are As Great, In Their Way, As The Pleasures Of Knowledge.

Stupidity And Ignorance

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.

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