Aldous Huxley

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

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.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

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

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

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

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.

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

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

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

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

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

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

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

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.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

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.

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.

The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

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

Every one belongs to every one else.

Every mans memory is his private literature.

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.

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

Happiness is like coke something you get as a by product in the process of making something else.

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.

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.

Consciousness is only possible through change change is only possible through movement.

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

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

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

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

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

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

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

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

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.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free

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

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

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

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.

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.

When the sun rises it rises for everyone.

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

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

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

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

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.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

The flower of the present rosily blossomed.

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

Lady Capricorn he understood was still keeping open bed.

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

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

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

Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions.

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

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

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.

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

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

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

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.

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

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

Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.

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.

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?

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.

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.

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

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

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

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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

Facts do not cease to exist because theyare ignored.

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

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization however impressive from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

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

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

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.