Aldous Huxley

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

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

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

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

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

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

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

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

“To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.”

“Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.”

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lig...”

“Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“A felicidade nunca é graciosa. Happiness is never gracious.”

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

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

“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.”

“Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a car...”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy...”

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

“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.'”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

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

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

“Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

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

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

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

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

“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.”

“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”

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

“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 proper study of mankind is books.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’ ‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly. ‘Quite so…”

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