Aldous Huxley

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Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
- Brave New World (1932)

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
- Texts and Pretexts (1932)

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
- Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
- Essay "Distractions I" in Christopher Isherwood's Vedanta for the Western World (1945)

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
- The Doors of Perception (1954)

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
- The Doors of Perception (1954)

The trouble with fiction...is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
- John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
- John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)

The Bhagavad Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.

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

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. (1937)

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

(Actually said by Raymond M. Weaver "Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic" George H. Doran Co., pub., New York 1921. P. 26)

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

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.

Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.