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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
Polite
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Complexity
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Pursuit
Living
False
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History
Favorite
Abstractions

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.
Aldous Huxley
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Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?
Aldous Huxley
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Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Aldous Huxley
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley
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Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry
Aldous Huxley
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For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.
Aldous Huxley
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Aldous Huxley
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The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.
Aldous Huxley
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Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard?
Aldous Huxley
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All right then, said the Savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
Aldous Huxley
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To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
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Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
Aldous Huxley
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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.
Aldous Huxley
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In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
Aldous Huxley
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All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
Aldous Huxley
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There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Aldous Huxley
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My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .
Aldous Huxley
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Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.
Aldous Huxley
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he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
Aldous Huxley
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The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.
Aldous Huxley