A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
— Aldous Huxley
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
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.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
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.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
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.
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
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.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
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.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
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.
