Aldous Huxley: The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-grou...

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.

Aldous Huxley

existence doe men

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.

Aldous Huxley

political principles personality

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Aldous Huxley

literature men memories

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.

Aldous Huxley

prohibition evil mind

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.

Aldous Huxley

reading book past

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

hate stars men

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.

Aldous Huxley

hypocrisy peace long

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Aldous Huxley

sacrifice self god

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

Aldous Huxley

grows quiet

"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.

Aldous Huxley

self feelings thinking

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Aldous Huxley

pageantry political art

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.

Aldous Huxley

communication humility reality

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Aldous Huxley

bullying race life

All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Aldous Huxley

syphilis brave-new-world unhappy

Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be

Aldous Huxley

ought goal

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

Aldous Huxley

inner-peace spiritual god

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Aldous Huxley

anthrax brave-new-world bombs

Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

Aldous Huxley

cages liberty world

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Aldous Huxley

darkness science knowledge

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Aldous Huxley

brave-new-world freedom views

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.