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To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.

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
Wrong
Distance
Philosophies
Seems
Travel
Civilizations
Home
Civilization
Imperfect
Way
Prove
Superior
Close
Superiors
Seem
Current
Philosophy
Currents
Hopelessly
Everybody
Discover
Inspection

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
Aldous Huxley
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It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
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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Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
Aldous Huxley
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One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.
Aldous Huxley
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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
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All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.
Aldous Huxley
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I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
Aldous Huxley
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The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aldous Huxley
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Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
Aldous Huxley
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Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?
Aldous Huxley
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Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.
Aldous Huxley
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Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
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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Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
Aldous Huxley
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A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
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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Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.
Aldous Huxley
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Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
Aldous Huxley
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Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.
Aldous Huxley