Proper Studies Quotes

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“The truth is paradoxical; but man’s passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Success and cynicism are not only achieved; they are also inherited.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“The forms change, but the substance remains.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“The self, however, is a living organism, and refuses to be denied without a struggle.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“The form of institutions and philosophies may change; but the substance that underlies them remains indestructible, because the nature of humanity remains unaltered.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“When psychological education is less rudimentary that it is at present, people belonging to different types will recognize each other’s right to exist. Every man will stick to the problems, inward or outward, with which nature has fitted him to deal; and he will restrained, if not by tolerance, at least by the salutary fear of making a fool of himself, from trespassing on the territory of minds belonging to another type.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate—which comes to the same thing in practice—we behave as though we were certain of men’s equality.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“All men have similar sensations, but not all have similar intuitions.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“To know a person’s character you must at least have talked with him, and unless you are gifted with remarkable intuitive insight you are not likely to know much about him unless you have seen him living and acting over a considerable period of time.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Ordinary men, we have seen, are not much interested in any political problems which do not immediately affect themselves.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“All human minds are not the same, that intelligence differs not only in degree, but to some extent also in kind.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“We are unable to see the mind, and find it difficult in consequence to understand its nature.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“To criticise something imperfect is always amusing, and maybe profitable in those cases where the imperfections can be remedies.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“One must have some basis of experience on which to build an imagination.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“To understand sympathetically, with one’s whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult—is, so far as I am concerned, impossible.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent—and in an absolute sense we can know nothing—a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Life is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Feeling are communicated by means of ideas, which are their intellectual equivalent; at the sound of the words conveying the ideas the appropriate emotion is evoked.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated one from another by irreducible differences.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“But men are not content merely desire; they like to have a logical or pseudo-logical justification for their desires; they like to believe that when they want something, it is not merely for their own personal advantage, but that their desires are dictated by pure reason, by nature, by God Himself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

“Individuals of one species are the same in essence or substance. Two human beings differ from one another in matter, but are the same in essence, as being both rational animals. The essential human quality which distinguishes the species Man from all other species is identical in both.”
― Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies