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.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able vicariously to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Like every other good thing in this world leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately however it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded in certain circles as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Speed it seems to me provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Great is truth but still greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art a scientific theory a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

My fate cannot be mastered, it can only be collaborated with and thereby to some extent directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul, I am only its noisiest passenger.

The impulse to cruelty is in many people almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Words words words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things only with the beastly words that stand for them.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Happiness is a hard master particularly other people's happiness.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Feasts must be solemn and rare or else they cease to be feasts.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or if not Homer somebody else of the same name.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the doors of perception.

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Uncontrolled the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

If human beings were shown what they're really like they'd either kill one another as vermin or hang themselves.

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written, there it looks wholly ridiculous.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Bondage is the life of personality and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it's walled and roofed with them. Yes and furnished too.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Science has explained nothing, the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted and always derided as fools and madmen.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself to multiply the ways in which he exists to make his life full significant and interesting.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not neither can it forget.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims born to have their throats cut as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Beauty is worse than wine it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

We participate in a tragedy, at a comedy we only look.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate if ever so slightly over misery and pain.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Like every man of sense and good feeling I abominate work.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Defined in psychological terms a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces sleep.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that from age to age nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art after all but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

The finest works of art are precious among other reasons because they make it possible for us to know if only imperfectly and for a little while what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with what happens to you.

A belief in hell, and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton, have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah they have all the necessary leisure.