Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
— Aldous Huxley
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.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
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.'
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
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.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
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.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
