Aldous Huxley on quotations

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something⁠—something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance⁠—did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde1854–1900De Profundis (1897)

A witty saying proves nothing.

Voltaire1694–1778Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882May 1849