Aldous Huxley

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

“A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

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

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

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

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

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

“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.”

“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 charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”