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

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
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I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
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Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
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Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
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Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.
Aldous Huxley
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life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
Aldous Huxley
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In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
Aldous Huxley
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In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being as we are, so we know.
Aldous Huxley
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A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
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Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.
Aldous Huxley
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Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.
Aldous Huxley
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All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made.
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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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley
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It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with I, me, mine, that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
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Reality cannot be ignored except at a price and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
Aldous Huxley
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That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
Aldous Huxley
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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