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Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

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
Almost
Vices
Pleasure
Suppose
Wearisome
Greater
Painful
Strenuously
Christian
Demand
Uninterrupted
Self
Sacrifice
Pilgrim
Life
Progress
Considerable
Virtue
Sacrifices
Mistake
Vicious

More quotes by 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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Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
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If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human Intelligence, Animal Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.
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Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals it cannot be mass-produced.
Aldous Huxley
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To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.
Aldous Huxley
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To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
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Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.
Aldous Huxley
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For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
Aldous Huxley
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It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.
Aldous Huxley
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Dedicated to all those who say: I don't have time for analytics or I don't understand analytics.
Aldous Huxley
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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Aldous Huxley
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But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
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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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That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
Aldous Huxley
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Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.
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Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
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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Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Aldous Huxley
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Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Aldous Huxley