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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

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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
Art
Intellectual
Complexities
Reality
Therefore
Pastime
Truth
Name
Abstraction
Philosophy
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False
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Abstractions

More quotes by 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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It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with I, me, mine, that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
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When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
Aldous Huxley
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When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.
Aldous Huxley
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
Aldous Huxley
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Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.
Aldous Huxley
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Pain was a fascinating horror
Aldous Huxley
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley
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Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
Aldous Huxley
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I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
Aldous Huxley
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[I am not] the captain of my soul I am only its noisiest passenger.
Aldous Huxley
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I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate.
Aldous Huxley
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Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
Aldous Huxley
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To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
Aldous Huxley
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I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe.
Aldous Huxley
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The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
Aldous Huxley