Aldous Huxley - Happiness Quotes

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Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Aldous Huxley
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Aldous Huxley
Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Aldous Huxley
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.

Aldous Huxley
"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Aldous Huxley
Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

Aldous Huxley
Beauty for some provides escape,
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley
And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

Aldous Huxley
Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.

Aldous Huxley
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley
I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Aldous Huxley