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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
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Aldous Leonard Huxley
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More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
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I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
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Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Aldous Huxley
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A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Aldous Huxley
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The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
Aldous Huxley
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[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.
Aldous Huxley
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Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?
Aldous Huxley
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Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.
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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In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead.
Aldous Huxley
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Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.
Aldous Huxley
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I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method.
Aldous Huxley
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All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol none of their defects.
Aldous Huxley
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Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
Aldous Huxley
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There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
Aldous Huxley
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People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.
Aldous Huxley
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A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.
Aldous Huxley
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
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The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.
Aldous Huxley
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The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.
Aldous Huxley