The Devils of Loudun

by Aldous Huxley

Even when he is doing his best to tell the truth, the successful orator is ipso facto a liar. And most successful orators, it is hardly necessary to add, are not even trying to tell the truth; they are trying to evoke sympathy for their friends and antipathy for their opponents.

A Church divided by intestine hatreds cannot systematically practice love and cannot, without manifest hypocrisy, preach it.

There are fashions in saints, just as there are fashions in medical treatment and women’s hats.

For a clever man, nothing is easier than to find arguments that will convince him that he is doing right when he is doing what he wants to do.

Obscurely, we know who we really are. Hence our grief at having to seem to be what we are not, and hence the passionate desire to overstep the limits of this imprisoning ego.

A poetry that represents man in isolation from nature, represents him inadequately.

(The history of spiritualism makes it very clear that fraud, especially pious fraud, is perfectly compatible with faith.)

It took seven devils and Canon Mignon to create the circumstances in which, at long last, it became possible for Sister Jane to do the splits.

In one of its aspects, civilization may be defined as a systematic withholding from individuals of certain occasions for barbarous behavior.

love does not go too well with weakness; for it requires a stout vessel to resist the pressure of its workings.”