The course of every intellectual, is he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.
Aldous Leonard Huxley Quotes
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence, it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been divided as fools and madmen.
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners – let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnances before he can bring himself to put these principles into practice.
Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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.
