Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

— Aldous Huxley

Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

— Aldous Huxley

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

— Aldous Huxley

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.

— Aldous Huxley

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favor has been withdrawn.

— Aldous Huxley

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

— Aldous Huxley

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

— Aldous Huxley

Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carpet de la Menagerie,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a card index? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? Or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well-educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions — as noncommittally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.

— Aldous Huxley

Dream in a pragmatic way.

— Aldous Huxley

Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.

— Aldous Huxley