Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

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.

"If you want to write, keep cats."

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

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

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.

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.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes

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.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

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

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

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.