There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on … - Aldous Huxley

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact - sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly different to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe if concerned, unnecessary.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Our world is in a bad way, and it looks as though it would be impossible to rescue it from its present plight, much less improve it, except by deliberate planning. Admittedly this is only an opinion; but there is every reason to suppose that it is well founded. Meanwhile, however, it is quite certain, because observably a fact, that in the process of trying to save our world or part of it from its present confusion, we run the risk of planning it into the likeness of hell and ultimately into complete destruction. There are cures which are worse than disease.