Tommy > Tommy's Quotes

“They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't change"
"Men do though”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“Wild inside; raging,
writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But
outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“I'm pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too...I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read them and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“One can’t have something for nothing. 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.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well being.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Pain was a fascinating horror”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

“For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose— well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World