Quotes by Huxley, Aldous

"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."

Huxley, Aldous on advertising
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"There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example."

Huxley, Aldous on desire
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"Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?"

Huxley, Aldous on drugs
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"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."

Huxley, Aldous on drugs
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"The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not."

Huxley, Aldous on education
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"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."

Huxley, Aldous on education
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"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent."

Huxley, Aldous on equality
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"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."

Huxley, Aldous on experience
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"Experience teaches only the teachable."

Huxley, Aldous on experience
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"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."

Huxley, Aldous on experience
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"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science."

Huxley, Aldous on experts
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"Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism."

Huxley, Aldous on facts
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"Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored."

Huxley, Aldous on facts
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"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

Huxley, Aldous on fame
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"Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt."

Huxley, Aldous on fanatics and fanaticism
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"A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt."

Huxley, Aldous on fanatics and fanaticism
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"Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers."

Huxley, Aldous on fathers and sons
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"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."

Huxley, Aldous on fiction
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"The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact."

Huxley, Aldous on forgiveness
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"A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it."

Huxley, Aldous on free will
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"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."

Huxley, Aldous on genius
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"Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced."

Huxley, Aldous on goodness
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"I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness."

Huxley, Aldous on happiness
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"What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure."

Huxley, Aldous on heroes and heroism
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"Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."

Huxley, Aldous on ignorance
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"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention."

Huxley, Aldous on ignorance
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"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."

Huxley, Aldous on individuality
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"Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs."

Huxley, Aldous on intelligence and intellectuals
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"Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life."

Huxley, Aldous on intelligence and intellectuals
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"Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted."

Huxley, Aldous on apathy
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"A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world."

Huxley, Aldous on life
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"People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!"

Huxley, Aldous on lust
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"Every man's memory is his private literature."

Huxley, Aldous on memory
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"Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors."

Huxley, Aldous on mistakes
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"The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved."

Huxley, Aldous on morality
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"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty."

Huxley, Aldous on morality
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"It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged."

Huxley, Aldous on murder
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"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

Huxley, Aldous on music
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"Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength."

Huxley, Aldous on mystics and mysticism
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"The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence."

Huxley, Aldous on nations
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