Aldous Huxley

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

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 author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

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

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

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

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

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.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

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

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.