Aldous Huxley

“A bad book is as much a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

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

“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.”

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied... In spite of everything I survive.”

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners--let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.”

“Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance: we don't know because we don't want to know.”

“Music is, after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible.”

“One of the great attraction 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.”

“Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.”

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

“The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

“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... always been derided as fools and madmen.”

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”