Aldous Huxley

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”

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

“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.'”

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

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

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

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

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

“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.”

“Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”

“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.”

“Experience teaches only the teachable.”

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

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

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

“Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

“People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.”

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

“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.”