Aldous Huxley
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.Collection: Knowledge
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.'Collection: Life
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
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.
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.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
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.
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.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
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.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
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.
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.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.