Aldous Huxley

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

“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

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

“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.”

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

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

“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.”

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

“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.”

“The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”

“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.”

“Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”

“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”

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

“Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

“There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.”