The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said,
a principal appetite of the soul. (Doors of Perception)


Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.
"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."
(Mustapha Mond, Brave New World)


"Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs."


"Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.
Idiots!"
(Bernard Marx, Brave New World)


"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."


"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
(Brave New World)


"Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimeters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies."
(Brave New World)


"You can't make flivvers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability."
(Brave New World)


"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations made for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
(Mustapha Mond, Brave New World)


"'The optimum population... is modeled on the iceberg - eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.' 'And they're happy below the water line?'
'Happier than above it.'"
(Brave New World)


"Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.
A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestionably,
than truth."
(Mustapha Mond, Brave New World)


"'But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?'...
'You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley.
He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct.
As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.'"
(Brave New World)


"Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities."
"All crosses had their tops cut and became T's."
(Brave New World)


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


"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda 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."
(Brave New World, foreword to 1946 edition)


"In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren.... Twenty-seven years later,...I feel a good deal less optimistic... In the West, ...individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But...this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane."
(Brave New World Revisited)


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.


Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.


The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.


Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?


Experience is not what happens to a man;
it is what a man does with what happens to him.


Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored.


A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.


A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.


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.


Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.


Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.


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


There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.


Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.


We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.


The only completely consistent people are the dead.


I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.


Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.


To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.


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


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


An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.


Maybe this world is another planet's hell.


Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.


Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.


Every man's memory is his private literature.


Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

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

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

Maybe this world is another planet's hell

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Exponents of a Nothing-But philosophy will answer that, since changes in body chemistry can create the conditions favorable to visionary and mystical experiences, visionary and mystical experiences cannot be what they claim to be, what for those who have had them, they self-evidently are. But this, of course, is a non sequitur.

A similar conclusion will be reached by those whose philosophy is unduly "spiritual." God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshiped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely "spiritual," purely "intellectual," purely "aesthetic," it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight. When they were not starving themselves into low blood sugar and a vitamin deficiency, or beating themselves into intoxication by histamine, adrenalin and decomposed protein, they were cultivating insomnia and praying for long periods in uncomfortable position in order to create the psycho-physical symptoms of stress. In the intervals they sang interminable psalms, thus increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood stream, or, if they were Orientals, they did breathing exercises to accomplish the same purpose. Today we know how to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve by direct chemical action, and without the risk of inflicting serious damage on the psychophysical organism. ... Knowing as he does (or at least as he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists-in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology and neurology. And on their part, of course, the specialists (if any of them aspire to be genuine men of science and complete human beings) should turn, out of their respective pigeonholes, to the artist, the sibyl, the visionary, the mystic-all those, in a word who have had experience of the Other World and who know ... what to do with the experience.