David Glotfelty > David's Quotes

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― 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 wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

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

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

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

“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― Aldous Huxley

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley, Do what you will: Twelve essays

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

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
― Huxley Aldous

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“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

“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

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception