Aldous Huxley

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.

The consistent thinker ... is either a walking mummy or else if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality a fanatical monomaniac.

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.

Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour for their curiosity their intolerance of shams the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

To his dog every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.

An old codger rampant and still learning.

The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they__l go through anything. You read and you__e pierced.

For I am you and you are I.

-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being...

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.

That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.