Particulars make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils

That is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny

A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes

Most historical facts are unpleasant

When you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible

The world was full of fathers—therefore full of misery; full of mothers—therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts—full of madness and suicide

Stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men, orient men, stable in contentment

Mother, monogamy, romance. The urge has but a single outlet. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy

Every one belongs to every one else

Stability. The primal and ultimate need

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 wellbeing

Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches...

Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly

He was wretched, in a word, because she has behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way

“I am I, and I wish I wasn’t”

For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilon’s had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority

A faint prejudice in favor of size was universal

Feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stands where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity

Men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through water—so utterly at home as to be unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being

It’s not good enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything

Show a little more pride

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one

Everybody’s happy now

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied

What would it be like if I were free—not enslaved by my conditioning

It makes me feel as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body

Don’t you wish you were free?

Wouldn’t you like to be free and happy in some other way, in your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way

Arrest your impulses

Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities

The greater a mans talents, the greater his power to lead astray

It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted

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

What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness

Nothing can be achieved without perseverance

Throw it all away. I come to bring you freedom

The world is stable nor. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave

You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art

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

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

A philosopher dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God’s property. It is not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way—to depend on no one—to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgement, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end

One beloved things because one has been conditioned to believe them

Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency