There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
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.
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.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
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.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
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 teaches only the teachable.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
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.
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.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
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.
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.
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?
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.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
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.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
