Quotes from Huxley Aldous Leonard

Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons -- that's philosophy.

For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently – though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.

You can't consume much of you sit still and read books.

Most people inhabit a universe that is like French café au lait—fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage.

That mania for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private.

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature.

Dying's an art, and at our age we ought to be learning it. It helps to have seen someone who really knew how. Helen knew how to die because she knew how to live—to live now and here and for the greater glory of God. And that necessarily entails dying to there and then and tomorrow and one's own miserable little self.

I'd rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawier than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.

Pero, en la realidad, somos nosotros, los ricos y muy educados blancos, los que andamos con el trasero al aire. Nos cubrimos por delante con alguna filosofía - cristiana, marxista, freudiana-física - , pero por detrás andamos al aire, a merced de los vientos de las circunstancias.

To justify homeopathy, he had developed a whole theory of non-material fields—fields of pure energy, fields of unembodied organization. In those days it sounded preposterous. But Henry, don't forget, was a man of genius. Those preposterous notions of his are now beginning to make sense. A few more years, and they'll be self-evident.

Caterpillars were the nearest approach, in real life, to Edgar Allan Poe.

What a gulf between impression and expression! That's our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teenagers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

Arrivés à ce point, nous nous trouvons devant une question très troublante. Désirons-nous vraiment agir ? Est-ce que la majorité de la population estime qu'il vaut bien la peine de faire des efforts considérables pour arrêter et si possible renverser la tendance actuelle vers le contrôle totalitaire et intégral ?

Et pourtant, nulle part on n'enseigne aux enfants une méthode systématique pour faire le départ entre le vrai et le faux, une affirmation sensée et une autre qui ne l'est pas. Pourquoi ? Parce que leurs aînés, même dans les pays démocratiques, ne veulent pas qu'ils reçoivent ce genre d'instruction.

Une vérité sans éclat peut être éclipsée par un mensonge passionnant.