Daily Inspiration Quote by Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s line lands with a courteous little bomb: he frames laziness as the only rational, humane position, then dares you to disagree without sounding either sentimental or dim. “Sense and good feeling” are doing the mischief here. He’s not confessing a private vice; he’s claiming moral high ground. Work isn’t merely tiresome - it’s suspect, a social demand dressed up as virtue. By making “abominate” the verb, he turns what’s usually a mild complaint into a principled revulsion, as if the office clock were a kind of ethical insult.

The subtext is classic Huxley: distrust the pieties of modern life, especially when they arrive as common sense. Early-to-mid 20th century Britain sold “work” as character-building and civilizational glue, from imperial administration to industrial discipline. Huxley, watching mass society perfect its machinery, keeps pointing to the human cost: dulling attention, narrowing desire, turning people into compliant functionaries. In that light, “abominate work” becomes less a joke about idleness than a critique of compulsory productivity as a spiritual and political project.

There’s also a sly class and intellectual angle. A novelist’s “work” is supposedly elevated (art!), yet Huxley collapses the distinction, suggesting all labor is, at base, coercion and routine. The wit works because it weaponizes respectability against itself: if you’re “of sense,” you should hate what your culture insists you worship.