Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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

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.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

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 rumor.

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.

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

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

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.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

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

Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of __ne Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs_ or the __arnet de la Ménagère,_ he began to cross-examine me about my methods of __ollecting material._ Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for __opy_ in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions _ as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. __y young friend,_ I said, __f you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats._ And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.