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Education
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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.
-Aldous Huxley
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Envy / Jealousy
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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
-Aldous Huxley
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Equality
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That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
-Aldous Huxley
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Experience
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
-Aldous Huxley
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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.
-Aldous Huxley
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Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
-Aldous Huxley
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Facts
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Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
-Aldous Huxley
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-Aldous Huxley
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Fame
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
-Aldous Huxley, Miss Thriplow, in Those Barren Leaves, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1925)
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Fanaticism
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
-Aldous Huxley
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A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
-Aldous Huxley
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Father
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Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
-Aldous Huxley
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Fellowship
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The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
-Aldous Huxley
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Forgiveness
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The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.
-Aldous Huxley
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Classic 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 wrongdoing. ROLLING IN THE MUCK IS NOT THE BEST WAY OF GETTING CLEAN.
-Aldous Huxley
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Freedom
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A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
-Aldous Huxley
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Genius
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We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
-Aldous Huxley
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Goodness
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Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
-Aldous Huxley
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Growth
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A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
-Aldous Huxley, In Music at Night and Other Essays (1949).
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Happiness
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Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-Aldous Huxley
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Haste, Hurry
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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
-Aldous Huxley
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Heroes/Heroism
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What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
-Aldous Huxley
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Identity
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If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy 1946, Chapter 9
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
-Aldous Huxley
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Books by and about Aldous Huxley