Crome Yellow Quotes

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be
done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of
hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the
precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Words - I wonder if you can realize how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Wild inside; raging,
writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But
outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Dinted
dimpled wimpled--his mind wandered down echoing corridors of
assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the
point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“The sick woman was usurping the place of the healthy one. He was being dragged back from the memory of the sunlit down and the quick, laughing girl, back to this unhealthy, overheated room and its complaining occupant.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“it was four years since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at peace, the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent as ever—more so, indeed, if that were possible. If only he could understand, if the heavens would but make a sign!”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow