Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and more rarely sustained contemplation.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

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

A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.