Aldous Huxley

"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?"

"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."

"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."

"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."

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

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

"Dream in a pragmatic way."

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

"Experience teaches only the teachable."

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."

"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.'"

"My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing."

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

"Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable."

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

"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."