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Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
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
Religion
History
Consolations
Firsts
Desolation
First
Consolation
Experienced
Unless
Nobody
Philosophy
More quotes by Aldous Huxley
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Aldous Huxley
No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.
Aldous Huxley
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
Aldous Huxley
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Aldous Huxley
Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.
Aldous Huxley
It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
Aldous Huxley
If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Aldous Huxley
Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley
Sunsets and death death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
Aldous Huxley
But then people don't read literature in order to understand they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
Aldous Huxley
The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.
Aldous Huxley
The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.
Aldous Huxley
When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.
Aldous Huxley
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.
Aldous Huxley
The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes
Aldous Huxley
Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!
Aldous Huxley
When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.
Aldous Huxley