Quote

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Aldous Huxley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Irrational
Reasonable
Basic
Learn
Art
Cannot
Reason
Way
Irrationality

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

Image
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. [Therefore be careful how you interpret your life. Don't think or speak negatively lest your subconscious and others take you at your word and you are hung by your own tongue!]
Aldous Huxley
Image
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
Image
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.
Aldous Huxley
Image
In the world of ideas everything was clear in life all was obscure, embroiled.
Aldous Huxley
Image
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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
Image
Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Aldous Huxley
Image
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Aldous Huxley
Image
A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Morality is always the product of terror its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
Aldous Huxley
Image
At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Ignore death up to the last moment then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley
Image
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard?
Aldous Huxley
Image
I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
Aldous Huxley
Image
My fate cannot be mastered it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul I am only its noisiest passenger.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Aldous Huxley