Doors of Perception - and - The Island / Aldous Huxley

Island 

(1962) 

by 

Aldous Huxley

 THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

 (1954) 

by 

Aldous Huxley

 

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Stability was practically assured."
ALDOUS HUXLEY ( Brave New World )
"Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill."
ALDOUS HUXLEY ( Brave New World Revisited, in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, New York, 1977, p. 99 )

"What fun it would be if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
World Controller Mustapha Mond ( Brave New World ) 

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."

"Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time."

"Happiness is like coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else."

"Dream in a pragmatic way."

"Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced."

"Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations."

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."

"The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen."

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters."

"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."

"Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh."

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."

"A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor."

"Experience teaches only the teachable."

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

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."
ALDOUS HUXLEY
1894 - 1963