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The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

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
Nothing
Humanity
Spectators
Must
Actors
Restaurants
Men
Eye
Satisfying
Life
Ends
Train
Women
Spend
Wells
View
Spectator
Might
Actor
Trains
Well
Views
Traveller

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
Aldous Huxley
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The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.
Aldous Huxley
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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
Aldous Huxley
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It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Aldous Huxley
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[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.
Aldous Huxley
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A large city cannot be experientially known its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley
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I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.
Aldous Huxley
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I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good what you make with them ought to be good too.
Aldous Huxley
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Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Aldous Huxley
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Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
Aldous Huxley
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Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.
Aldous Huxley
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
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All that happens means something nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Aldous Huxley
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It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.
Aldous Huxley
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I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.
Aldous Huxley
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...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
Aldous Huxley
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Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!
Aldous Huxley
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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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Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east.
Aldous Huxley
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An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley