Alex > Alex's Quotes

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
For being still. Coupled with this
a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.
But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,
not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems

“Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. ”
― Hannah Arendt

“The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.”
― Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet

“Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“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. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

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

“No social stability without individual stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World