Aldous Huxley

“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.”

“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”

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

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

“History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.”

“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

“My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.”

“A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.”

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

“The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”

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

“Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.”

“Brutes are merely brutal; men and women are capable of being devils and lunatics. They are no less capable of being fully human-even, occasionally, of being a bit more than fully human, of being saints, heroes and geniuses.”

“Words are good servants but bad masters.”

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

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

“Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.”

“'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the planBy which this best of worlds is wisely planned.One law He made for woman, one for man:We bow the head and do not understand.”

“A million million spermatozoa   All of them alive:Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah   Dare hope to survive.”

“Shame to have ousted your betters thus,   Taking ark while the others remained outside!Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,   If you’d quietly died!”

“Beauty for some provides escape,Who gain a happiness in eyeingThe gorgeous buttocks of the apeOr Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.”

“Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor!We'll pledge our Empire vast across the flood:For Blood, as all men know, than Water's thicker,But Water's wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.”

“Ragtime... but when the wearied BandSwoons to a waltz, I take her hand,And there we sit in peaceful calm,Quietly sweating palm to palm.”

“Dinted, dimpled, wimpled — his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.”

“He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.”