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Ifs Quotes by Aldous Huxley

32 Ifs quotes by Aldous Huxley

All Ifs quotes Aldous Huxley’s page

When you wander into Huxley’s “Ifs,” you’ll find a compact set of ideas that tease out possibilities and consequences. The 32 entries capture his knack for blending philosophical curiosity with a literary flair, giving you a quick yet rich glimpse into how he wrestles with conditional thought.

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If you want to write, keep cats.

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If you don't gamble, you'll never win.

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If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those…

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If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

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If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?

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If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a…

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If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists…

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What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

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The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

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Everyone thinks this way at some point. The important thing is to power through and get to learning. If you really don't…

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If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can…

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If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving…

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The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing…

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For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as…

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Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge…

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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…

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We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then…

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If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be…

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Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose…

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Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted…

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A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing…

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If the men of the Middle Ages... lived in filth and discomfort, it was not for any lack of ability to change…

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Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we…

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If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being…

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If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads:…

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Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn’t fit—well, that…

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The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces…

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The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all…

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If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles… They have to be caught. And only the people who've got…

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Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory…

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Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope…

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The Alexander Technique gives us all things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due…

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Other authors on Ifs

More by Aldous Huxley

“Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”

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Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that…

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My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my…

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Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.

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Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously,…

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“The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No,…

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“I’ll MAKE you be free whether you want to or not.’ -The Savage”

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Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create…

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The third petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done…

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“Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment. Apparently, for going on walks in the Lake District; for that was what he now…

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All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

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Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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“What you need is a gramme of soma.” “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

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To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain…

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“Quote of the day:Quote of the day: A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be…

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