But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

Aldous Huxley

Categorized in : Art Past Truth

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Aldous Huxley

technology love thinking

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

motivational inspirational life

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.

Aldous Huxley

nwo taken people

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Aldous Huxley

mind believe religion

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.

Aldous Huxley

self dark children

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Aldous Huxley

progress medicine healthy

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Aldous Huxley

diversity ignorance justice

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Aldous Huxley

motivational positive inspirational

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.

Aldous Huxley

political doubt philosophy

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.

Aldous Huxley

voice real struggle

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

Aldous Huxley

wall mind believe

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.

Aldous Huxley

communication men two

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder.

Aldous Huxley

technique people years

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

Aldous Huxley

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

Aldous Huxley

life-goal goal life-is

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Aldous Huxley

education motivational inspirational

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

Aldous Huxley

giving country children

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Aldous Huxley

wine hurt beauty

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Aldous Huxley

tyrants compassion thinking

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

learning health men