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If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

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
Painful
Discovery
Remain
Illusion
Emotional
Pleasure
Pleasures
Knowledge
Prefer
Self
Ignorant

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Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
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A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
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If you don't gamble, you'll never win.
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Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.
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The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
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They're old they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now But God doesn't change Men do though
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Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
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And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children sometimes like the noise of lambs.
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Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
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The proper study of mankind is books.
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The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.
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Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
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If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.
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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.
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Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
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For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
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Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.
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Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
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