Quote

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

Aldous Huxley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Truth
Name
Abstraction
Philosophy
Polite
Names
Complexity
Simple
Pursuit
Living
False
Substituting
History
Favorite
Abstractions
Art
Intellectual
Complexities
Reality
Therefore
Pastime

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

Image
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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
Image
In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.
Aldous Huxley
Image
No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
Aldous Huxley
Image
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Pain was a fascinating horror
Aldous Huxley
Image
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Aldous Huxley
Image
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
Aldous Huxley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Aldous Huxley
Image
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
Aldous Huxley
Image
For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.
Aldous Huxley