Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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.

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

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

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

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.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

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.

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.

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.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

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

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.

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?

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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 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.

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.

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.

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.