Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point (1928)

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

Aldous Huxley
The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.

Aldous Huxley
The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Aldous Huxley
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

Aldous Huxley
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

Aldous Huxley
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Aldous Huxley
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Aldous Huxley
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Aldous Huxley
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Aldous Huxley
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

Aldous Huxley
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

Aldous Huxley
Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it.

Aldous Huxley
Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves.

Aldous Huxley
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

Aldous Huxley
A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night's dinner to furnish out this morning's lunch.

Aldous Huxley
Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.

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

Aldous Huxley
Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.

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

Aldous Huxley
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Aldous Huxley
Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Aldous Huxley
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Aldous Huxley