“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”

— Aldous Huxley (1937), Ends and Means: an Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals [7]

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask: does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or evidence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

“When the rigorous tradition (of sexual restraint) is inherited by a number of generations, the energy becomes productive. Productive energy does not spend itself exclusively in expansion; it also goes into science, speculation, art, social reform. Where productive energy persists for some time, a factor which Dr. Unwin calls ‘human entropy’ comes into play.”

“A few months later the other breast had to be cut off. After that there were the X rays, the radiation sickness and then, little by little, the degradation … If it weren’t so unspeakably hideous, it would be really funny. What a masterpiece of irony! Here was a soul that radiated goodness and love and heroic charity. Then, for no known reason, something went wrong. Instead of flouting it, a little piece of her body started to obey the second law of thermodynamics. And as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity. The heroism went out of here, the love and the goodness evaporated. For the last months of her life she was no more the Aunt Mary I had loved and admired; she was somebody else, somebody almost indistinguishable from the worst and weakest of the old people she had once befriended and been a tower of strength to. She had to be humiliated and degraded; and when the degradation was complete, she was slowly, and with a great deal of pain, put to death in solitude.”

“One thinks one’s self 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. And that precisely is the first half of Buddha’s message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn’t stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slow-down of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature.”

“Swept up by the seeming unstoppable force of Vilfredo Pareto’s juggernaut in the 1930s, Huxley wrote a prominent review of Mind and Society in 1935, and declared Pareto his mentor. What attracted Huxley to Pareto was his cynicism toward human stupidity, the cavalier attitudes societies adopt towards issues of power.”

— Howard Schneiderman (2012), “Pacifism and Non-Attachment: Aldous Huxley and Utopian Thought” [1]

“Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure — chemically pure, I mean, [with a laugh] not morally.”

— Aldous Huxley (1928), Point Counter Point [9]