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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
Discovery
Remain
Illusion
Emotional
Pleasure
Pleasures
Knowledge
Prefer
Self
Ignorant
Painful

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We live together, we act on, and react to, one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
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Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.
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The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society Providence takes its cue from men.
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Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
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Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
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A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.
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These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
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Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
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People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
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This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.
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The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
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It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
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Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
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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.
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Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.
Aldous Huxley
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The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
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Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
Aldous Huxley