Happiness is never grand. — Aldous Huxley

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness. — Aldous Huxley

What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness! — From Brave New World

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness. — Aldous Huxley

Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here. — Aldous Huxley

That is the secret of happiness and virtue––liking what you’ve got to do. — Aldous Huxley

I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness. — Aldous Huxley

One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. — Aldous Huxley

Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too. — Aldous Huxley

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over–compensations for misery. — Aldous Huxley

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. — Aldous Huxley

Oh, what fun it would be’, he thought, ‘if one didn’t have to think about happiness. — Aldous Huxley

We are long before We are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself. — Aldous Huxley

You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. — Aldous Huxley

Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. — Aldous Huxley

For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. — Aldous Huxley

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. — Aldous Huxley

Dualism… Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. — Aldous Huxley

In real life there is no such person as the average man. — Aldous Huxley

One seventh of your life is spent on Monday. — Aldous Huxley

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. — Aldous Huxley

In life, man proposes, God disposes. — Aldous Huxley

Life was so short, and books so countlessly many. — Aldous Huxley

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

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. — Aldous Huxley

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies. — Aldous Huxley

Indifference to all the refinements of life––it’s really shocking. Just Calvinism, that’s all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin’s theology. — Aldous Huxley

In the world of ideas everything was clear in life all was obscure, embroiled. — Aldous Huxley

The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life. — Aldous Huxley

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. — Aldous Huxley

But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well–rounded; it is supposed to be one–pointed–a compass, not a weathercock. — Aldous Huxley

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil. — Aldous Huxley

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. — Aldous Huxley

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low. — Aldous Huxley

Man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground. — Aldous Huxley

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. — Aldous Huxley

Dedicated to all those who say: ‘I don’t have time for analytics’ or ‘I don’t understand analytics’. — Aldous Huxley

He had discovered Time and Death and God. — Aldous Huxley

To be a fool at the right time is also an art. — Aldous Huxley

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time. — Aldous Huxley

Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure–seekers really are! — Aldous Huxley

There seems to be plenty of it,’ was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. — Aldous Huxley

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument. — Aldous Huxley

It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop) — Aldous Huxley

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. — Aldous Huxley

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. — Aldous Huxley

Both of us victims of the same twentieth–century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. — Aldous Huxley

Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. — Aldous Huxley

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us. — Aldous Huxley

My mind is so busy thinking about values that I don’t have time to experience them. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time–the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing. — Aldous Huxley

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. — Aldous Huxley

I fell,’ he repeated for the hundredth time. ‘But you didn’t fall very far,’ Mary Sarojini now said. ‘No, I didn’t fall very far,’ he agreed. ‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ the child inquired. — Aldous Huxley

One right–thinking man thinks like all other right–thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong–thinking man of another time. — Aldous Huxley

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

The truth is paradoxical; but man’s passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth. — Aldous Huxley

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge — Aldous Huxley

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. — Aldous Huxley

Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made. — Aldous Huxley

A love of nature keeps no factories busy. — Aldous Huxley

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. — Aldous Huxley

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. — Aldous Huxley

The poet’s place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature. — Aldous Huxley

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance. — Aldous Huxley

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. — Aldous Huxley

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society. — Aldous Huxley

Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick. — Aldous Huxley

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century? — Aldous Huxley

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human. — Aldous Huxley

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. — Aldous Huxley

Chaos and ineptitude are anti–human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology. — Aldous Huxley

The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, The prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much. — Aldous Huxley

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain oTher sets of people are human. — Aldous Huxley

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain. — Aldous Huxley

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. — Aldous Huxley

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. — Aldous Huxley

What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! — Aldous Huxley

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. — Aldous Huxley

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves. — Aldous Huxley

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

You can’t learn a science unless you know what it’s all about. — Aldous Huxley

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled. — Aldous Huxley

Even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes even science. — Aldous Huxley

Science has ‘explained’ nothing; …the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness…. — Aldous Huxley

Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied. — Aldous Huxley

Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. — Aldous Huxley

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

Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas. — Aldous Huxley

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers. — Aldous Huxley

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable. — Aldous Huxley

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body. — Aldous Huxley

The more powerful and original a mind, The more it will incline towards The religion of solitude. — Aldous Huxley

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. — Aldous Huxley

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education. — Aldous Huxley

We were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as ‘being in one’s right mind. — Aldous Huxley

The victim of mind–manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. — Aldous Huxley

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. — Aldous Huxley

Intellectuals … regard over–simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations. — Aldous Huxley

Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. — Aldous Huxley

Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. — Aldous Huxley

I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non–self. — Aldous Huxley

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. — Aldous Huxley

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind–body of his fellows. — Aldous Huxley

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail’s a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind. — Aldous Huxley

After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self–indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. — Aldous Huxley

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley