Aldous Huxley

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one - it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.

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

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done whether you like it or not.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.

From their experience, or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

To his dog every man is Napoleon, hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested, on the contrary - he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

The worst enemy of life freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy, their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.