Brave New World Quotes: The 50 Best & Most Important Lines From Aldous Huxley's Masterpiece - Deepstash

Explore the World's Best Ideas

Join today and uncover 100+ curated journeys from 50+ topics. Unlock access to our mobile app with extensive features.

50 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Quotes

50 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Quotes

Note that some of the top quotes on Goodreads were actually not from the book but from Huxley on other occasions, and some were from Brave New World Revisited , a follow-on retrospective Huxley published 26 years later. I skipped those in favor of only including quotes from the original book. I also took all quote versions from the 2007 Vintage edition for extra consistency.

44

544 reads

1. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

58

884 reads

2. “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.”  

56

802 reads

3. “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.”

56

607 reads

4. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

58

636 reads

5. “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”

51

617 reads

6. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”

48

603 reads

7. “I am I, and I wish I wasn’t.”

51

515 reads

8. “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”

49

545 reads

9. “‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’ ‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence. ‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.”

43

385 reads

10. “No social stability without individual stability.”

53

436 reads

11 . “Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks—already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.” 

46

394 reads

12. “Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

45

388 reads

13. “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.”

48

276 reads

14. “‘Everyone belongs to everyone else, after all.’ One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!”

44

295 reads

15. “Ending is better than mending.”

51

276 reads

16. “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

45

315 reads

17. “‘What you need is a gramme of soma.’ ‘All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.’”

45

249 reads

18. “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one.”

45

286 reads

19. “‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked, ‘as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?’”

47

213 reads

20 . “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

43

246 reads

21. “‘Everybody’s happy now.’ ‘Yes, everybody’s happy now,’ echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.”

43

228 reads

22. “Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time. ‘Then what’s time for?’ asked Lenina in some astonishment.”

44

206 reads

23. “‘Talking? But what about?’ Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.”

43

217 reads

24. “‘When the individual feels, the community reels,’ Lenina pronounced. ‘Well, why shouldn’t it reel a bit?’”

43

212 reads

25. “Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. […] Now that it looked as though the threats were really to be fulfilled, Bernard was appalled. Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.”

44

163 reads

26. “‘Rags, rags!’ the boys used to shout at him. ‘But I can read,’ he said to himself, ‘and they can’t. They don’t even know what reading is.’ It was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn’t mind when they made fun of him.”

43

165 reads

27. “A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

47

188 reads

28. “Somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic.”

43

151 reads

29. “Looking at the two pots, he had to laugh. ‘But the next one will be better,’ he said, and began to moisten another piece of clay. To fashion, to give form, to feel his fingers gaining in skill and power—this gave him an extraordinary pleasure. […] They worked all day, and all day he was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness.

44

126 reads

30. “‘It is finished,’ said old Mitsima in a loud voice. ‘They are married.’ […] It is finished. Old Mitsima’s words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished… In silence and from a long way off, but violently, desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished.”

43

124 reads

31. “He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… He had discovered Time and Death and God.”

45

120 reads

32. “The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.”

47

153 reads

33. “Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual?”

45

156 reads

34. “Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”

44

147 reads

35. “Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.”

43

128 reads

36. “Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily recondition 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, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true.

45

114 reads

36. (Continued)

Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.”

45

136 reads

37. “‘What fun it would be,’ he thought, ‘if one didn’t have to think about happiness!’”

45

139 reads

38. “One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

48

123 reads

39. “You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.”

45

151 reads

40. “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.”

44

148 reads

41. “His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run.”

43

149 reads

42. “Every change is a menace to stability.”

44

128 reads

43. “Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”

43

131 reads

44. “People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness.”

46

127 reads

45. “‘But God doesn’t change.’ ‘Men do, though.’ ‘What difference does that make?’ ‘All the difference in the world.’

47

136 reads

46. “You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”

43

133 reads

47. “Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.”

46

119 reads

48. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

46

115 reads

49. “‘What you need,’ the Savage went on, ‘is something withtears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.’

43

142 reads

50. “In spite of their sadness—because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another—the three young men were happy.

45

150 reads

IDEAS CURATED BY

tomjoad

Introverted Extravert

CURATOR'S NOTE

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - 50 Best Quotes

Tom Joad's ideas are part of this journey:

Daring To Be Vulnerable

Learn more about religionandspirituality with this collection

How to overcome fear of rejection

How to embrace vulnerability

Why vulnerability is important for personal growth

Related collections

Read & Learn

20x Faster

without
deepstash

with
deepstash

with

deepstash

Personalized microlearning

100+ Learning Journeys

Access to 200,000+ ideas

Access to the mobile app

Unlimited idea saving

Unlimited history

Unlimited listening to ideas

Downloading & offline access

Supercharge your mind with one idea per day

Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.

Email

I agree to receive email updates