Aldous Huxley Quotes

Everyone has a conflict inside of them - the conflict between what you should do and what you want to do.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Temptation to behave is terrible.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

My searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

I often long to . . . give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation.

One of the greatest snares is the number of good things we might do. Jesus Christ never did the good things He might have done, He did everything He ought to do because He had His eye fixed on His Father's will and He sacrificed Himself for His Father.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

Shall I, to please another wine-sprung minde, Lose all mine own? God hath giv'n me a measure Short of His can and body; must I find A pain in that, wherein he finds a pleasure?

God, I want what you want more than I want what I want.

Sin will be always acting, if we be not always mortifying, we are lost creatures.

Some people are capable of making great sacrifices, but few are capable of concealing how much the effort has cost them; and it is this concealment that constitutes their value.

The opposite of love? Vice. Temptation. The negative influences that we have. The bad energy that comes around us and makes us do certain things. To me, it's always been a war between the two.

The heart of a Christian, like the moon, commonly suffers an eclipse when it is at the full, and that by the interposition of the earth.

Spiritual Christians look upon the world not as a playground but as a battleground.

I'm a person who's trying to live within divine law, to the best and it's very hard because it's self-discipline, because the more you realise, the more you've got to get yourself straight, so it's hard, you know. I'm trying and there are a lot of people who are trying, even people who are not conscious that they are doing it, but they are really doing things for the good, or just to be happy or whatever.

I have known men who thought the object of conversion was to cleanse them as a garment is cleansed, and that when they are converted they were to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, the door of which was to be shut, so that no dust could get at them. A coat that is not used the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted, the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

I could, of course, have done no more if no less than affiliated myself in one way or another with a particular church, could have simply read books about Christianity, talked to Christian people, set out to discover something about what a Christian life is supposed to involve and then tried as best I could to live one. But, on the one hand, that didn't seem enough to me, and on the other, it seemed to much.

The way to Heaven is straight and narrow: they who wish to arrive at that place of bliss by walking in the paths of pleasure shall be disappointed; and therefore few reach it, because few are willing to use violence to themselves in resisting temptations.

Temptation turns you. It makes you into something you never dreamed, it presses you to give up everything you ever loved, it calls you to sell your soul for one, fleeting moment.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good...Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.

I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.