"One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy."
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Quote collection
Aldous Huxley quotes (page 20 of 34)
679 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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?"
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"Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work."
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"Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London."
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"It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."
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"Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?"
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"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."
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"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
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"It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous."
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"The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence."
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"Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of."
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"Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books."
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"The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes"
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"At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction."
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"In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual....Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature."
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"Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent."
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"My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism ."
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"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
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"The silent bear no witness against themselves."
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"Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!"
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