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After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

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
Form
Indulgence
Self
Prevent
Mind
Vice
Thinking
Addiction
Like
Vices
Tickle
Oneself
Amuse
Drink
Excessive
Reading
Reads

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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The more stitches, the less riches.
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A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
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People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
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Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
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We live together, we act on, and react to, one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
Aldous Huxley
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If you don't gamble, you'll never win.
Aldous Huxley
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The lion will lay down with the lamb...but every morning they'll have to provide a new lamb. Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
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What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!
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It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
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Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
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There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
Aldous Huxley
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The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.
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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But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.
Aldous Huxley
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In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being as we are, so we know.
Aldous Huxley
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The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
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Consciousness is only possible through change change is only possible through movement.
Aldous Huxley
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Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
Aldous Huxley
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To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
Aldous Huxley
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley