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A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: July 26
Died: 1963
Died: November 22
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Godalming
Surrey
Aldous Leonard Huxley
Freedom
Pessimistic
May
Pessimism
Men
Lunch
Optimistic
Optimism
Believer
Eating
Food
Determinist

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.
Aldous Huxley
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Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment
Aldous Huxley
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People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Aldous Huxley
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Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
Aldous Huxley
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
Aldous Huxley
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The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
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The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
Aldous Huxley
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How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!
Aldous Huxley
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Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Aldous Huxley
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Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Aldous Huxley
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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.
Aldous Huxley
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The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Aldous Huxley
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Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Aldous Huxley
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The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions
Aldous Huxley
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I am I, and I wish I weren't.
Aldous Huxley
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Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.
Aldous Huxley
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I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.
Aldous Huxley
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I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.
Aldous Huxley
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An irrelevance, and your life's altered.
Aldous Huxley