Aldous Huxley

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. . . .

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

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.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

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.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

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.

There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

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.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.