Moksha Quotes

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“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 should have this experience.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing, has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game goes on.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Propaganda may be defined as opposed to rational argument; argument based upon facts. Argument based on facts aims at producing an intellectual conviction; propaganda aims, above all, at producing reflex action. It is aimed at bypassing the rational choice based upon knowledge of facts and getting directly at the solar plexus, so to speak, and affecting the subconscious.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“If you want nature to treat you well, you must treat nature well. If you start destroying nature, nature will destroy you, and this basic moral precept is fundamental in our present knowledge of ecology and conservation. What we know now about ecology points to the fact that nature exists in the most delicate balance, and that anything which tends to upset the balance will produce consequences of the most unexpected character and often of the most disastrous character.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquility (and especially of tranquility imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“In politics, the near future is likely to be closer to George Orwell’s 1984 than to Brave New World.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“To prevent economic breakdown and to repress popular discontent, the governments of hungry countries will be tempted to enforce ever-stricter controls. Furthermore, chronic undernourishment reduces physical energy and disturbs the mind. Hunger and self-government are incompatible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Preparation for ultimate death is to be aware that your highest and most intense form of life is accompanied by, and conditional upon, a series of small deaths all the time. We have to be dying to these obsessive memories..”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should work, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should word, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“All the naturally occurring sedatives, narcotics, euphorics, hallucinogens, and excitants were discovered thousands of years ago, before the dawn of civilization. This surely is one of the strangest facts in that long catalogue of improbabilities known as human history. It is evident that primitive man experimented with every root, twig, leaf, and flower, every seed, nut, berry and fungus in his environment. Pharmacology is older than agriculture. There is good reason to believe that even in paleolithic times, while he was still a hunter and a food-gatherer, man killed his animal and human enemies with poisoned arrows. By the late Stone Age, he was systematically poisoning himself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Alcohol is one of the oldest and certainly the most widely used of all consciousness-changing drugs. Unfortunately, it is a rather inefficient and, at the same time, a rather dangerous drug.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“There is an urge to self-transcendence and, with it, the victims of tension, becomes acute and agonizing. In every human culture certain procedures for achieving temporary self-transcendence, and thereby relieving tension, have been developed and systematically employed. These procedures may be classified under a few comprehensive headings. There are chemical methods, the musical and gymnastic methods, the methods that depend on the subjection of insulated individuals to the influence of the crowds, the various religious methods and, finally the methods whose purpose is mystical self-transcendence -the various yogas and spiritual exercises of Oriental and Western traditions.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Whatever one says on the air is bound to be misunderstood; for people take from the heard or printed discourse that which they are predisposed to hear or read, not what is there- all that TV can do is to increase the number of misunderstanders by many thousandfold – and at the same time to increase the range of misunderstanding by providing no objective text to which the voluntarily ignorant can be made to refer.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong; the next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“The older revolutionaries sought to change the social environment in the hope (if they were idealists and not mere power seekers) of changing human nature. Then coming revolutionaries will make their assault directly on human nature as they find it, in the minds and bodies of their victims or, if you prefer, their beneficiaries.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“All the natural narcotics, stimulants, relaxants and hallucinants known to the modern botanist and pharmacologist were discovered by primitive man and have been in use from time immemorial.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“The story of drug-taking constitutes one of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant chapters in the natural history of human beings. Everywhere and at all times, men and women have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their generally dull and often acutely unpleasant existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep and ecstasy, in the heaven or the limbo of visionary phantasy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Primitive man explored the pharmaceutical avenues of escape from the world with a truly astonishing thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered. Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilized descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“In modern times beer and the other toxic short cuts to self-transcendence are not longer officially worshipped as gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in practice millions upon millions of civilized men and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating and transfiguring Spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and its derivatives, to the barbiturates, and the other synthetic additions to the age-old catalogue of poisons capable of causing self-transcendence. In every case, of course, what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement. The self-transcendence is invariably downward into the less that human, the lower than personal…”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Between every human consciousness and the rest of the world stands an invisible fence, a network of traditional thinking-and-feeling patterns, of secondhand notions that have turned into axioms, of ancient slogans revered as divine revelations.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience