Quote

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

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
Couldn
Birds
Pep
Went
Shut
Francis
Imagine
Perfectly
Presumption
Understand
Mouth
Fortunately
Even
Kept
Sermons
Good
Mouths
Preach
Bird
Talks
However
Preaching
Thrushes

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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I'd rather be myself, he said. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
Aldous Huxley
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A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Aldous Huxley
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God: a gaseous vertebrate.
Aldous Huxley
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The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.
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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The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
Aldous Huxley
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Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
Aldous Huxley
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It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
Aldous Huxley
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The proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous Huxley
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To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Aldous Huxley
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Consciousness is only possible through change change is only possible through movement.
Aldous Huxley
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A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
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To be a fool at the right time is also an art.
Aldous Huxley
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Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Aldous Huxley
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The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health. We cannot ask for more from any system nor, if we seriously desire to alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask for any less.
Aldous Huxley
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A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
Aldous Huxley
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At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
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In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
Aldous Huxley
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But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
Aldous Huxley
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Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.
Aldous Huxley