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. I...

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant,...

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled,...

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

And no wonder; for the new technique of “subliminal projection,” as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable...

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object...

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

The man who wishes to know the “that” which is “thou” may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a...

Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. […] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to...

And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to...

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say ‘no’ to the boss. But a man cannot say ‘no’ to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss’s favour...

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Our civilisation being what it is, you’ve got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting....

The silence of the storm weighs heavilyOn their strained spirits: sometimes one will saySome trivial thing as though to ward awayMysterious powers, that imminently lieIn wait, with the strong exorcising graceOf everyday’s futility. DesireBecomes upon...

Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.

The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Una verdad sin interés puede ser eclipsada por una falsedad emocionante.

Cine naiba se crede el ?”. Întrebarea nu i se adresa lui Cézanne în particular, ci speciei umane în general. Cine se credeau oamenii ?

stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.

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...

Yes,” Mustapha Mond was saying, “that’s another item in the cost of stability. It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained...

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”…”There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”…”But they used to take morphia and...

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.

Like every other good thing in thisworld, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us beduly thankful for that, my...

In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem …

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the...

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad...

There’s nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be!

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of...

All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified,...

One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the...

The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what...

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.”In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’...

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women – I...

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine...

The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?” “You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me...

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.

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...

the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering...

We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can’t leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can’t allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like...

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.

It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people...