Aldous Huxley

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented ha...”

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

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

“The complement of works, imagining and emotions is faith - not faith in the sense of belief in a set of theological and historical affirmations, nor the sense of a passionate conviction of b...”

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

“A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.”

“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”

“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...”

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send...”

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being...”

“Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what...”

“Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morni...”

“In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And th...”

“Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.”

“He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop....”

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

“The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act a...”

“Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....”

“The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.”

“In theory everyone agreed that applied science was made for man and not man for applied science. In practice great masses of human beings have again and again been sacrificed to applied scie...”