The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.


Aldous Huxley

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Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
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A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a sk...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nati...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritua...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Pain was a fascinating horror
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. An...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can neve...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distres...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are no...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing w...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the star...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is on...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of o...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it cla...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motiva...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a v...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cea...
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol....
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY