Zee Schaefer > Zee's Quotes

“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words---people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history---sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Only times and places, only names and ghosts.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Here and now, boys.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The only truly consistent are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity”
― Aldous Huxley

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“A felicidade nunca é graciosa.

Happiness is never gracious.”
― Aldous Huxley

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“People don't help much.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“History is the nothing people write about a nothing.”
― William Golding, Darkness Visible

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
― Douglas Adams

“God's Final Message to His Creation:
'We apologize for the inconvenience.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”
― Douglas Adams

“Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n.
One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.”
― Douglas Adams, The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet--But There Ought to Be

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything