Quotes from Aldous Huxley

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

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

All too many Christians have behaved as though the devil were a first principle, on the same footing as god. They have paid more attention to evil and the problem of its eradication than to good and the methods by which individual goodness may be deepened, and the sum of goodness increased.

Other people can't make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

Familiarity breeds indifference.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are—there we are in the Golden Future.

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.

It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)