Love Quote by Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s joke lands because it’s delivered like friendly lifestyle advice while smuggling a bleak diagnosis of modern feeling. “Hurry up” mimics the chirpy urgency of self-improvement culture: don’t think, optimize. The “cigar habit” isn’t really about tobacco; it’s a stand-in for any controlled, repeatable pleasure you can buy, schedule, and keep at arm’s length. A habit, unlike a person, won’t surprise you, disappoint you, or demand that you grow.

The sting is in the comparison: cigars as “more lasting than love” and “less costly” in “emotional wear and tear.” He’s treating romance like a high-maintenance consumer good with hidden fees, the way an industrial society trains you to think about everything. Love becomes an expense account item: volatile, depreciating, liable to bankrupt you psychologically. The cigar, by contrast, is a small ritual of mastery - a private performance of calm, status, and control, with a predictable burn rate.

Context matters: Huxley wrote in a world sobered by mass society, war, and the creeping sense that human intimacy was being reorganized by convenience, technique, and distraction. That’s his recurring target from Brave New World onward: the replacement of messy, meaningful bonds with soothing substitutes. The line flatters the reader’s cynicism (“you know love hurts”) while quietly indicting it. If the “major happinesses” are habits, not relationships, the punchline isn’t that love is overrated; it’s that we’ve started bargaining away vulnerability for comfort and calling it wisdom.