Quotation by Aldous Huxley

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British novelist. The Fifth Earl of Gonister, in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, pt. II, ch. 4 (1939).

In his eighteenth-century diaries, the Fifth Earl of Gonister expresses a thoroughgoing cynicism about human nature that complements William Propter's skepticism.
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