The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell

by Aldous Huxley

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

Familiarity breeds contempt, and how to survive is a problem ranging in urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.