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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
Knowledge
Prefer
Self
Ignorant
Painful
Discovery
Remain
Illusion
Emotional
Pleasure
Pleasures

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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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.
Aldous Huxley
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Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.
Aldous Huxley
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The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions
Aldous Huxley
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I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
Aldous Huxley
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From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.
Aldous Huxley
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In real life there is no such person as the average man.
Aldous Huxley
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God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.
Aldous Huxley
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Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Aldous Huxley
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If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
Aldous Huxley
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Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
Aldous Huxley
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Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Aldous Huxley
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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Aldous Huxley
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The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
Aldous Huxley
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Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
Aldous Huxley
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A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
Aldous Huxley
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If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
Aldous Huxley
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Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Aldous Huxley
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To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
Aldous Huxley
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My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .
Aldous Huxley
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Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.
Aldous Huxley