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For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

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
Happiness
Intellectually
Evil
Stamps
Everyone
Evils
Particulars
Make
Philosophers
Generalities
Philosopher
Compose
Necessary
Stamp
Virtue
Backbone
Society
Collectors

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Aldous Huxley
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Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.
Aldous Huxley
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Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.
Aldous Huxley
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Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.
Aldous Huxley
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I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous Huxley
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Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
Aldous Huxley
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Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.
Aldous Huxley
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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Aldous Huxley
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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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People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Aldous Huxley
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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
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We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge
Aldous Huxley
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God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.
Aldous Huxley
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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
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Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.
Aldous Huxley
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Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.
Aldous Huxley
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Dedicated to all those who say: I don't have time for analytics or I don't understand analytics.
Aldous Huxley
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley