For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopea from us, how deep the sea, etc.? We are neither wiser, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. What is astrology but vain elections, predictions? all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery? physic, but intricate rules and prescriptions? philology, but vain criticisms? logic, needless sophisms? metaphysics themselves, but intricate subtleties and fruitless abstractions? alchemy, but a bundle of errors? To what end are such great tomes? why do we spend so many years in their studies? Much better to know nothing at all, as those barbarous Indians are wholly ignorant, than, as some of us, to be so sore vexed about unprofitable toys: stultus labor est ineptiatrum [it is foolish to labor at trifles], to build a house without pins, make a rope of sand, to what end? cui bono?

We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, providing that while unlearning one thing we are learning another. No vacuum in the human heart! Certain forms are torn down, and it is well they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

In the meantime let us study the things which are no more. It is necessary to understand them, were it only to avoid them. The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future.

The people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of the word); but they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution.

Sape homo de vanae gloriae contemptu vanius gloriatur.
A man can be most boastful in expressing his contempt of fame.

Vivere nolunt, mori nesciunt.
They will not die; they dare not live.

Let us not carry flame where light alone will suffice.

‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

The light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.

The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,
Colosso’s statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leave they any little memorie,
    The Passenger may warned be to say,
    They had their being here, another day.

But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweet to runne,
Preserved by the living Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
    Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
    Ere Homer die, thou shalt be fired first.