Aldous Huxley Quotes
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A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
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De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
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An irrelevance, and your life's altered.
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Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
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Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.
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Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
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To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
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Every man's memory is his private literature.
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This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.
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The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
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If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
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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 other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
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Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
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The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
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To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
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The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
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Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.
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In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead.
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The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
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The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.
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To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
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The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
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Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
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Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.
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God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
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...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.
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You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
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A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.
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