Continued Insights from Aldous Huxley

"The proper study of mankind is books"

"My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing"

"Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength"

"People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are"

"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look"

"There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God"

"The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous"

"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs"

"Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness"

"Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay"

"Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work"

"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels"

"It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous"

"God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness"

"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn"

"Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts"

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"

"Experience teaches only the teachable"

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you"

"Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying"

"Every man's memory is his private literature"

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting"

"Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image"

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead"

"Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision"

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions"

"Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning"

"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder"

"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie"

"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex"

"Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain"

"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours"

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception"

"The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency"

"The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen"

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm"

"The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved"

"That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep"

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history"

"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent"

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Inspiring Quotes by Aldous Huxley - Page 2