Aldous Huxley

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

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 religous or political ideas.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

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.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

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.

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

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

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

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

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

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

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.

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

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

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

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

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

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

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

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

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.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.