That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you�ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.


Aldous Huxley

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More Aldous Huxley

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situati...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in whic...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man's memory is his private literature.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and fur...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't chan...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
No social stability without individual stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I am I, and I wish I weren't.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want good...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resou...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's sou...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accompli...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a m...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron whe...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manne...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirte...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes, and thanks to words, we have sunk to th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to ment...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man's memory is his private literature.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or le...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those wh...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give plea...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most ignorance is invincible ignorance.We don't know because we don't want to know.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands a...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no patter...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to ma...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emot...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality a...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
An atheist is a person who has no invisible means of support
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to k...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of wor...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solit...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of p...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of w...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience teaches only the teachable.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the so...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever gi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same s...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however pa...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behav...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the k...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of gen...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing cha...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do i...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the of...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profoun...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the d...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. S...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. D...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compas...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever gi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in whic...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Forgetting that several excuses are always less convincing than one.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often su...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-g...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, ex...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given hi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own se...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, how...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the m...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a sk...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nati...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritua...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Pain was a fascinating horror
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. An...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can neve...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distres...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are no...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing w...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the star...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is on...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of o...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Death Â… ItÂ’s the only thing we havenÂ’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it cla...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motiva...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a v...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cea...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol....
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY