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Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

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
Science
Elsewhere
Facts
Nonsense
Ventriloquist
May
Knees
Dummies
Nothing
Sitting
Dummy
Made
Wise
Knee
Men
Wisdom
Utter
Talk
Indulge
Words
Sheer

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.
Aldous Huxley
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Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Aldous Huxley
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Happiness is never grand.
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Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Aldous Huxley
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Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
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.
Aldous Huxley
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But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock.
Aldous Huxley
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When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Aldous Huxley
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The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
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Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
Aldous Huxley
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Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
Aldous Huxley
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Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?
Aldous Huxley
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The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
Aldous Huxley
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Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Aldous Huxley
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An irrelevance, and your life's altered.
Aldous Huxley
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Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Aldous Huxley
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After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.
Aldous Huxley
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Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Aldous Huxley
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley