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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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Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.
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I ate civilization. It poisoned me I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.
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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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Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.
Aldous Huxley
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Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Aldous Huxley
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Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
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To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
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It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
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Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.
Aldous Huxley
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There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
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We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Aldous Huxley
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The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes
Aldous Huxley
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All that happens means something nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Aldous Huxley
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Sunsets and death death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
Aldous Huxley
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Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
Aldous Huxley
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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Aldous Huxley
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Words are good servants but bad masters.
Aldous Huxley
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Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
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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Almost all of us long for peace and freedom but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.
Aldous Huxley