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Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
Aldous Huxley -
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference.
Aldous Huxley
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley -
Facts are ventriloquists' 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 -
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Aldous Huxley -
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley -
However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.
Aldous Huxley -
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Aldous Huxley
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Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley -
A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
Aldous Huxley -
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Aldous Huxley -
In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.
Aldous Huxley -
In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called 'the Bitch Goddess, Success.' Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.
Aldous Huxley -
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.
Aldous Huxley
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Words are good servants but bad masters.
Aldous Huxley -
One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time-that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.
Aldous Huxley -
Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
Aldous Huxley -
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
Aldous Huxley -
Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?
Aldous Huxley -
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Aldous Huxley
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Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Aldous Huxley -
Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.
Aldous Huxley -
How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called 'numinous'. Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.
Aldous Huxley -
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley