Written towards the end of his life, the book draws Huxley's view about the perfect utopic society. With only minor influences from Brave New World, Huxley succeeds in creating a society where Budhism, psichology and medicine, drugs and sexuality, and many more, all add their benefit to the individual experience, to the personal achievement.
- faith is something very different from belief. Belied is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's .. - people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history - sadism versus duty, sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia.. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being.
- .. about the sexuality of children. What we're born with , what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit.
- does one learn how to forget?
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet be here, on the spot, with the living.
- one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad. One just has to accept one's grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic.
- Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment.
- Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.
- You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions.
- Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- "I" affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am". Two tiny word, but what an enormity of untruth.
- .. a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.
- The point is to get people to understand we're not at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we're disturbed by what's going on inside our heads, we can do something about it.
- one thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.
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