Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Aldous Huxley
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Aldous Huxley quotes
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.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
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 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.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
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.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
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.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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.
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
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.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful - if strenuously led - as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.
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.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
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.
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
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.
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful - because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.
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 most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
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.
The proper study of mankind is books.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
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.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
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.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
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.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
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.
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
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.
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