Aldous Huxley

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.