Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Patriotism
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.Collection: Brainy
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.Collection: War
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.Collection: Pet
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.Collection: Power
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.Collection: Motivational
Experience teaches only the teachable.Collection: Experience
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.Collection: Nature
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.Collection: Knowledge
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?Collection: Art
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.Collection: Happiness
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.Collection: Truth
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: History
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.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Beauty
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Great
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Freedom
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Travel
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.Collection: Power
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.Collection: Religion
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.Collection: Attitude
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.Collection: Truth
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Good
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.Collection: Beauty
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.Collection: Freedom
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: War
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.Collection: Freedom
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.Collection: History
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.Collection: Truth
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.Collection: Music
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Education
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.Collection: Travel
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: War
Dream in a pragmatic way.Collection: Dreams
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.Collection: History
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.Collection: Truth
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.Collection: Intelligence
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.Collection: Happiness
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.Collection: Technology