Quotes Gallery
Quotations
Competition
Life is a game of rock paper scissors. There are 3 different types of competitors: safe, greedy, and aggressive.
If they are safe, you go greedy (or also safe, just don’t go aggressive)
If they are greedy, you go aggressive (or also greedy, just don’t go safe)
If they are aggressive, you go safe (or also aggressive, just don’t go greedy)
Avoid having the same done to you.
Anglo Saxon poem “The Wanderer”
Swa þes middangeard,
ealra dogra gehwam,
dreoseð ond fealleð
So this middle-earth,
a bit each day,
droops and decays
How often the lone-dweller anticipates
some sign, this Measurer’s mercy
— must always must—
mind-caring, along the ocean’s windings,
stirring rime-chill seas, hands as oars
many long whiles, treading the tracks of exile—
the way of the world an open book always.
So spoke the earth-stepper, a memorial of miseries
slaughter of the wrathful, crumbling of kinsmen:
“Often, every daybreak, alone I must
bewail my cares. There’s now no one living
to whom I dare mumble my mind’s understanding.
I know as truth that it’s seen suitable
for anyone to bind fast their spirit’s closet,
hold onto the hoards, think whatever —
“Can a weary mind weather the shitstorm?
I think not.
Can a roiling heart set itself free?
I don’t think so.
So often those hustling for the win must
clamp down grim mindings in their coffer,
just as I ought fetter my inborn conceit,
often wounded, wanting where I know,
kindred pulled away, how many winters now?
I shrouded my giver in dark earth
and wended away worrisome,
weather-watching the wrapful waves,
hall-wretched, seeking a center,
far or near, where they might be found,
in some mead-hall, who knows of my kind,
willing to adopt a friendless me,
though they be joyful enough.
The well-travelled know how slicing
sorrow can be by one’s side,
short a struggle-friend, however dear.
The ways of wandering wind him round
not even a wire of wound gold—
a frigid fastness, hardly any fruits of the fold.
This one lists the hall-lads swilling rings,
giver-drenched in youngsome days,
in both furnishing and feasting.
Joys all flown, vanished all away!
Therefore one knows who long forgoes
the friendly words of their first,
when sleep and sorrow stand together
clutching at the crestfallen alone.
Somehow seems that somewhere inside
this one enwraps his lord and kisses his lord,
and laps both hands and head
on his knee, when, once upon a year
blurry in time now, one thrived by the throne —
too soon rousing, a friendless singular
seeing all around a fallowness of waves,
sea-birds bathing, fanning their feathers,
ice and snow hurtling, heaved up with hail.
So heavy and heavier the hurt in heart
harrowing for the lost. Sorrow made new
whenever recalling pervades the mind,
greeting kindred joyfully, drinking in the look of them
fellowable and fathoming—
they always swim away.
Gulls ghost-call — I don’t know their tongue too well,
much of their comfort weird. Worrying made new
to that one who must send more and more, every day,
a bleary soul back across the binding of waves.
Therefore I cannot wonder across this world
why my mind does not muster in the murk
when I ponder pervading all the lives of humans,
how suddenly they abandon their halls,
proud princes and young. Right here in the middle
it fumbles and falls every day —
No one can be wise before earning their lot of winters
in this world. The wise one, they stay patient:
not too heart-heated, not so hasty to harp,
not too weak-armed, nor too wan-headed,
nor too fearful nor too fey nor too fee-felching,
and never tripping the tongue too much, before it trips them.
That one bides their moment to make brag,
until the inner fire seizes its moment clearly,
to where their secret self veers them.
Who’s wise must fore-ken how ghostly it has been
when the world and its things stand wasted —
like you find, here and there, in this middle space now —
there walls totter, wailed around by winds,
gnashed by frost, the buildings snow-lapt.
The winehalls molder, their wielder lies
washed clean of joys, his peerage all perished,
proud by the wall. War ravaged a bunch
ferried along the forth-way, others a raptor ravished
over lofty seas, this one the hoary wolf
broke in its banes, the last a brother
graveled in the ground, tears as war-mask.
That’s the way it goes—
the Shaper mills middle-earth to waste
until they stand empty, the giants’ work and ancient,
drained of the dreams and joys of its dwellers.
Then one wisely regards this wall-stead,
deliberates a darkened existence,
aged in spirit, often remembering from afar
many war-slaughterings, and speaks these words:
“Where has the horse gone?
Where are my kindred?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the benches to bear us?
Joys of the hall to bring us together?
No more, the bright goblet!
All gone, the mailed warrior!
Lost for good, the pride of princes!
How the space of years has spread —
growing gloomy beneath the night-helm,
as if it never was!
Tracks of the beloved multitude, all that remains
walls wondrous tall, serpents seething—
thanes stolen, pillaged by ashen foes
gear glutting for slaughter — we know this world’s way,
and the storms still batter these stony cliffs.
The tumbling snows stumble up the earth,
the clash of winter, when darkness descends.
Night-shadows benighten, sent down from the north,
raw showers of ice, who doesn’t hate humanity?
All shot through in misery in earthly realms,
fortune’s turn turns the world under sky.
Here the cash was a loan.
Your friends were a loan.
Anyone at all, a loan.
Your family only ever a loan—
And this whole foundation of the earth wastes away!”
So says the wise one, you don’t hear him at all,
sitting apart reading their own runes.
It’s better to clutch at your counsel,
you ought never manifest your miseries
not too quickly where they well,
unless the balm is clear beforehand,
keep whittling at your courage.
It will be well for those who seek the favor,
the comfort from our father in heaven,
where a battlement bulwarks us all.
Anon
The faintest ink is better than the best memory.
A lion does not concern itself with the opinions of the sheep.
The safe zone is where dreams go to die.
It is usually best to be generous with praise, but cautious with criticism.
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
Rule number one: work with influential officials on the fringe of the system.
Rule number two: use the prestige of the institution while remaining as far as possible from its center.
Rule number three: Find closet individuals from within the system to help you.
One simple law of the Universe is this: take hydrogen gas and over a long period of time it makes people.
Dance every day, and if you can’t, dream.
Susan B. Anthony
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Aristotle
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Paul Aubuchon
He who fails to question is asking for trouble.
St Augustine
The arrogance of pride, the pleasures of lust, and the poison of vain curiosity are the impulses of a soul that is dead.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.
Morris Berman
We have inherited a civilization in which the things that really matter in human life exist at the margin of our culture.
Bible
“He hath said, which heard the words of God, and knew the knowledge of the most High, which saw the vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but having his eyes open.”
(Numbers 24:16)
Then God said Behold, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 1:29)
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:11)
And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4).
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36)
Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children (Proverbs 17:6)
Napoleon Bonaparte
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
Anthony Bourdain
Traveling … the only money spent, that makes you richer.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you.
Charles Bukowski
That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.
Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
stay with the beer.
beer is continuous blood.
a continuous lover
I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
E.M. Butler
Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public.
The Myth of the Magus, 1948
Nesssa Carey
By orders of magnitude, our brains are the most complex structures in the known universe. They contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three-dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It’s hard to imagine this, so let’s visualize each connection as a disc that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
Thomas Carlyle
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
Charles Darwin
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections — a mere heart of stone.
Leonardo da Vinci
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Denis Diderot
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Peter Drucker
Culture easts strategy for breakfast.
Wayne Dyer, PhD
Ask yourself this: Are you a human being having a spiritual experience, or a spiritual being having a human experience?
Albert Einstein
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
Great souls have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
He who finds a thought that enables him to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature has been given great grace.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.
The prestige of the government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition Law. Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
– My first impression of the USA, 1921
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
William Faulkner
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Ben Franklin
Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.
What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.
Be generous with praise but frugal with lending
Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.
Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of.
Paul Gaugin
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
Robert A. Heinlein
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
Werner Heisenberg
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Ernest Hemingway
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
G. Michael Hopf
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Horace
Credo Quia Absurdum Est- Tertullian
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Steve Jobs
The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
George Jung
May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face. And may the wings of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.
Alan C. Kay
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice
Marshall McLuhan
Each new technology turns its predecessor into an art form.
Herman Melville
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
– Moby Dick; or the Whale Chapter 96 The Try-Works
Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
H. L. Mencken
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships of those engaged in the furthering of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. We are HERE and it is NOW. (further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.)
Michelangelo
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
Alan Moore
Is There a God? Well, I can’t move for them, quite frankly. I’m looking at about 12 of them from where I’m sitting at the moment. I’m kind of swamped for choice. Yeah, there’s probably tons of them. There’s probably a swarm of gods. I’ve had sort of passing acquaintanceship with a few of them. Whether there’s one definitive one… Yeah, there probably is. But how the celestial-league table stacks up, I’m not sure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher.
Though the favorites of the gods die young, they also live eternally in the company of the gods.
-The Birth of Tragedy
John Opella
You can’t plot the vibe.
Claude le Petite
The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror.
Teddy Roosevelt
It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man
who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and
who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Rumi
Even
After
All this time,
The Sun never says to the Earth
You owe me
Look what happens
With a Love like that
It light s up
The whole
Sky.
Schopenhauer
As Schadenfreude is simply theoretical cruelty, so cruelty is simply practical Schadenfreude.
Oh wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
– Tempest
What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
As You Like It Act 2, scene 1, 12–17
Through the house give gathering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire:
Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from brier;
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippingly.
TITANIA
First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
Song and dance
Through the house give gathering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire:
Every elf and fairy sprite
Hop as light as bird from brier;
And this ditty, after me,
Sing, and dance it trippingly.
First, rehearse your song by rote
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be;
And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand;
Never mole, hare lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.
With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.
Trip away; make no stay;
Meet me all by break of day.
-A Midsummer Night’s dream
Edward Snowden
Saying you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Bret Stephens
Anti-Semitism is both the socialism of fools and the conservatism of creeps.
Hunter S. Thompson
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Leo Tolstoy
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Henry D. Thoreau
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-Walden
Sir George Trevel
The deep fascination of myths is that they speak directly to deeper levels of our nature and to the subconscious, and give the profound assurance that we are each, in essence, deathless and immortal sparks of Divinity on the long evolutionary journey into higher consciousness.
Mark Twain
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
On New York:
I have at last, after several months’ experience, made up my mind that it is a splendid desert–a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
A man walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day, elbowing his way through a buzzing multitude of men, yet never seeing a familiar face, and never seeing a strange one the second time.
He visits a friend once–it is a day’s journey–and then stays away from that time forward till that friends cools to a mere acquaintance, and finally to a stranger.
So there is little sociability, and consequently, there is little cordiality. Every man seems to feel that he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so he rushes, rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable–never has any time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.
George Wald
A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
William Wallace
All men die, but not all men truly live!
Simone Weil
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Visionary Quotations
Douglas Adams
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
-Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
Anon
AN ODE TO TRANCE
A moving kaleidoscope of sounds, penetrating the ear….
Dissolving when each beat becomes complete.
Swirls of imagination block the sky,
what you need to see is in one’s own eye.
A channel of thought opens wide
on e discovered, but where did it hide?
Wordless pictures describe your mind,
it’s leading you somewhere –
what do you need to find?
Concentration becomes meditation, nerves
screaming with elation and joy.
Time, tick tickling at the surreal.
His humor bordering near the unreal.
Elastic energy stretches around
twisting and knotting – is that a new sound?
I find that place, that garden of peace,
where leaves of music fall to the ground.
Pick one up, throw it high
following the flow, feeling the sound.
There it goes away in the breeze
Blowing, blowing ….. my mind.
-Justin
Ancient places of power where our ancestors gathered to conduct sacred ceremonies, celebrating their connection to the earth, sky, and to each other. These sites provided the focus for the community ritual where we danced all night around huge fires to celebrate the seasons and empower ourselves as one tribe united in spirit. As we danced on the earth the power of these sites was released into our bodies, giving us strength and connecting us to Gaia. Then the religions of fear took hold. They destroyed our sacred sites and our rituals, burning all who dared to question. But the power could not be suppressed forever and the great cycles of time have brought us full circle to this new moment and we gather once again. The ancient memory has been reawakened, the all-night dance ritual has returned. We are once again experiencing the mystical power of the Trance.
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships of those engaged in the furthering of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.
In a fast society, slow emotions become extinct.
All matter is simply spirit moving slow enough to see.
True freedom has always been illegal.
A fool and his money are soon partying.
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
It is only in the experience of the pure Void that we realize the possibility of manifesting all things. Like the Big Bang that created our universe, it is the singularity, the nothingness from which everything arises. This is the essence of Zen – and of the true psychedelic experience.
Listening to Paul Van Dyk mixing turbo rocket booster trance while driving a BMW 328 at 140 MPH with the sun setting while you’re heading towards Berlin from the border in Poland takes on a whole different meaning than when you’re listening to trance with 16 year old raver kids cracked out on drugs at an overpriced party in Denver.
David Arora
Most [trippers] would rather change their way of looking at reality, than face the difficult and discouraging task of transforming reality itself.
-Mushrooms Demystified, 1986
Australian Shaman
Remember in the dream time things are not what they seem, but what you make them seem.
-Gargoyles, 1995
Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book Of The Dead)
Subtle, sparkling, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome,in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations… That is the radiance of thine own true nature.
Basic Military Requirements, for US military, 1995
Hallucinogens: Examples of hallucinogens are mescaline, LSD, and PCP. (These drugs are also called psychedelics.) They distort the perception of reality. They affect sensation, thinking, self-awareness, and emotion. Depending on the dose and strength of the particular drug, changes in time and space perception, delusion (false beliefs), and hallucinations (experiencing nonexisting sensations) may occur.
Beatles
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. – I Am the Walrus
William Blake
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William S. Burroughs
Thanks for a nation where nobody’s allowed to mind their own business.
David Burnett
I truly wish someone had told me that The Exorcist would not be a good thing to watch while tripping for the first time.
–11 hrs after first LSD experience, 1995
Robert F. Campbell, on VPL
I can’t even remember what drug I’m on, but I know it’s acid.
Joseph Campbell
And what then is finally the best austerity, what is the
best discipline?
The best austerity is to enjoy your friends. Enjoy your
meals. Realize what play is. Participate in the play, in the play of life. This
is known as Mahasuka, the Great Delight.
Lewis Carrol
What sort of people live about here?’ asked Alice.
In THAT direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, lives a Hatter; and in THAT direction,’ waving the other paw, lives a March Hare.
Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’ But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: we’real mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. You must be,’ said the Cat,or you wouldn’t have come here.’ – Alice in Wonderland
One side will make you larger; the other side will make you smaller.- the Caterpillar
Salvador Dali
I do not take drugs. I am drugs.
Diary of a Genius, 1966
Ram Dass
You finally have to give up experiencing it to be it…
Doing Your Own Being, 19??
Dr. Seuss
From there to here,from here to there, funny things are everywhere…… If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.
-One Fish two fish red fish blue fish, 1960
E.J. Gold
Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimension maze of living electrical force, cloacked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention. – Life in the Labyrinth, 1986
Greek Hymn to Demeter
Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiated and who has no part in them, never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom.
trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914
Donald O. Hebb
Rejection of the idea that mental events have no locus by common sense, for whatever reason, proves nothing. Other fields of science are built on propositions that may seem absurd but in fact are true. Air is heavy, has weight? Water is made up of two gases? The continents are adrift in the oceans? 1980
Jimi Hendrix
Say Hello to my Mother and Father,Earth and Space.
Albert Hofmann
I hope to see the development of a technique of Applied Mysticism – a technique for individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the Other World in the affairs of This World.
The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken fora pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.
Because the enthusiasm necessary for successful endeavors cannot be commanded, and because the enthusiasm was already present in me as far as this problem was concerned, I decided to conduct the investigation myself.
(concerning the isolation of psilocybin from mushrooms)
While it is undoubtedly possible, with the aid of psychoactive drugs, to span both time and space, this method of overcoming these factors is unfortunately possible only psychically and not physically. Would the latter be possible, you may rest assured that I would now have taken the appropriate dosage of LSD or psilocybin so as to be transported on the flying carpet to San Francsico, for the purpose of participating in the symposium on psychoactive drugs.
Ethnobotanical search or psychoactive drugs (Letter) 1979
Instead of all of this energy and effort directed at the war to end drugs, how about a little attention to drugs which will end war?
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Aldous Huxley
What you take in by visionary experience you must give out by love and intelligence in daily life.
Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, none of their defects…
-Brave New World
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not asthey appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose
The longest art, the Promethean way
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan
That inward fire, whose small precarious flame,
Kindled or quench, creates
The noble or the ignoble men we are,
The worlds we live in and the very fates,
Our bright or muddy star.
-from Orion, 1931
The various other worlds, with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements of totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large.
– Doors of Peception, 1954
Henry James
Only when the Doors of Perception are cleansed can we see the universe for what it truly is, infinite.
William James, under nitrous oxide: 1882
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
Ram Kir
A God defined is a God confined.
Kluver’s 4 Geometric Constants
4 distinct geometric patterns common to all visual
hallucination – funnel, cobweb, spiral, honeycomb –
Steve Kubby
When you undergo a visionary experience, what you are really doing is blowing your socially conditioned, 20th century, hive mind and allowing your brain to, literally, come to its senses.
-The Politics Of Consciousness, 1995
C.W. Leadbeater
We must beware of committing the fatally common fallacy of assuming that all we see is all there is to see.-
Timothy Leary
Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries when they peeked through the curtains and discovered that this world-so manifestly real was actually a tiny stage set constructed by the mind. We discover abruptly that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrications.- 1966
Critics have told me I’ve ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can’t be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me.
-1994 lecture in SF
You’re god, baby. It’s your reality. It all comes from you…-
– You Can Be Anyone This Time Around, 1970
If you don’t like what you’re doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove!
(in the memory of a trail-blazer)
John Lilly
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, either is true, or becomes true.
In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
Tom Lyttle
The “RX” sign seen on all pharmacies, is a prayer to Horus, the Egyptian god of healing. Chemistry comes from Khem (Egypt).
Alchemy -the father of psychedelia…from Al (God) Khem (Egypt).
The war on drugs is really a war against “the pharmakoi” – a ritual scapegoated group represented in classic Greek theatre.
“Pharm” is the same in the Old Testament word “pharmakaia” or witch.
Hence the war on drugs maintains elements of the witch-hunt, scapegoat and irrational hysteria – even mythologically inspired hysteria that will not go away.
Psychedelic Monographs & Essays 1996
Machinelf
Our whole universe is just a speck of dead skin off the central reality GOD that is always taken up again in UNITY with all matter = the ONE TRUE SENTIENT
All reason is barreling through time, slowly organizing itself back into ORDER, which smacks dead on the razor’s edge aainst CHAOS, the Right & Left brain of the CENTRAL BEING
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay.
A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
Terence McKenna
And it occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own.
The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.
Studying the Human Mind without Psychedelic drugs is like studying religion without a Bible.
When I think of psychedelic society, what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology is the idea of creating a society that always lives in the light of the mystery of being.
-Esalen, Feb 1984
Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
Something very peculiar adheres to the adventure of being human.
Psychedelics free us from the anxiety – make us less of a terrified victim and more of a spectator.
-during “Visualizing the Unspeakable” at Charlottesville, VA May, ’95
Zachary Moser
Blinking for an instant I was lost within myself on a path in a garden, which became a forest, which became a world, which became a Universe, and every time I glanced back there was nothing. (on the effects of LSD), 1995
Vladimir Nabokov
I can’t tell you how
I knew – but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
– Pale Fire, describing an NDE
Humphry Osmond
To fathom hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic
Jonathan Ott
Remember kids, rotate your receptors!
Palenque BPC,’96, second session
Steven Puerto
Enlightenment is the conversion of religious experience to religious life.
The totality of oneself is comprised of experience, sensation, and desire. The demands and habits of civilization keep us focused on anarrow range of our total possibility. When a truly new experience exposes our conscious self to a broader definition of our totality, the relative importance of much of our daily activity is diminished.
Do you have the curiosity and courage to meet the rest of whom you are?
Tom Robbins
The difference between us and Helen Keller is that she knew she was deaf and blind.-
Foreward to Archaic Revival 1991
Seneca
The Fates lead those who will; those who won’t, they drag.
Rupert Sheldrake
Has elucidated the theory of morphogenetic fields to describe extracorporeal or intercorporeal mechanisms of learning.
Alexander T. Shulgin Amsterdam, 18 Feb 1996
Q: Why did video drugs never became a big success?
A: Well look at the cost involved a $10.000 computer system or a few cents worth of chemical.
2C-B is a tool which ties the mental processes directly and constructively into the physical soma.
Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus
Everything done for the first time unleashes a demon.
August Owsley Stanley III
Chemistry is applied theology.
Hunter S. Thompson
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is the ones who have gone over.
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!
Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
Would that it were possible for you to grow wings, and soar into the air! Poised between earth and heaven, you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea and the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars, and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven encompasses all. What happiness were that, my son, to see all these borne along with one impulse, and to behold Him who is unmoved moving in all that moves, and Him who is hidden made manifest through his works!
Begin then, my son Tat, with a prayer to the Lord and Father, who alone is good; pray that you may find favour with him, and that one ray of him, if only one, may flash into your mind, that so you may have power to grasp in thought that mighty Being. For thought alone can see that which is hidden, inasmuch as thought itself is hidden from sight; and if even the thought which is within you is hidden from your sight, how can He, being in himself, be manifested to you through your bodily eyes? But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind, then, my son, He will manifest himself to you. For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe; and you can behold God’s image with your eyes, and lay hold on it with your hands.
If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.
Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.
But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?
Jason Volpe
It’s not what we learn about plants that is important, but what they can teach us about themselves that is.
Captain Voodoo
Apart from the five senses with which we perceive this reality, what evidence do we have, to prove its existence? Australia. 1996.
R. Gordon Wasson
There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
“Seeking the magic mushrooms” Life, 1957 (rep. in Pharmacotheon, p.58)
Alfred North Whithead
The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Edward O. Wilson
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
Eugene S. Wilson
Only the curious will learn, only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The Quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.