Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island