Aldous Huxley

"Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons." Aldous Huxley

"Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement." Aldous Huxley

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced." Aldous Huxley

"The more you know, the more you see" Aldous Huxley

"It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling." Aldous Huxley

"In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual....Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature." Aldous Huxley

"Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness." Aldous Huxley

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten." Aldous Huxley

"The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense." Aldous Huxley

"A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable." Aldous Huxley

"A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind." Aldous Huxley

"All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter." Aldous Huxley

"Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations." Aldous Huxley

"To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style." Aldous Huxley