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Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

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
Perception
Perceptions
Sacrifice
Spontaneous
Direct
Immediate
Circumstances
Intuition
Besetting
Modern
Temptation
Intuitions
Feelings
Prefer
Reasoned
Men
Intellect
Reflections
Reflection
Verdict

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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.
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Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
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People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.
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The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
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One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
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Love casts out fear but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
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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.
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If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?
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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.
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Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.
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For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
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If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Aldous Huxley
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
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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.
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Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment
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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.
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But then people don't read literature in order to understand they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
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Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
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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