Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

There is no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.

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

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

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

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.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

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.

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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

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