“Pain was a fascinating horror”
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
“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.”
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”
“Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization.”
“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”
“And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
“Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.”
“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.”
“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
“I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”
“You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.”
“I am I, and I wish I wasn’t.”
“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. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”
“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”
“When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”
“I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. . . .
“No social stability without individual stability.”
“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
“There was something called liberalism…Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”
“We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending.”
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Isn’t there something in living dangerously?
“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.”
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
Nothing costs enough here.
There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
“What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”
“But every one belongs to every one else.”
“Can you say something about nothing?”
“They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't change"
"Men do though”
“The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”
“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”
“O brave new world that has such people in it.”
“To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.”
“"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.”
“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.”
“In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
“The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.”
“He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’
‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.
‘Quite so…”