Aldous Huxley

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

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.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Can you say something about nothing?

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

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.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

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 question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

But every one belongs to every one else