Terence McKenna Quotes

Quotes about:

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  What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, Hallucinations, Facts

  177 Copy quote

• Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

  Terence McKenna

  Dream, Teacher, Commitment

  913 Copy quote

• You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

  Terence McKenna

  Inspirational, Life, Light

  180 Copy quote

• The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

  Terence McKenna

  World, Tiny, Fractions

  "Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature". Book by Terence McKenna, 1987.

  27 Copy quote

• The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

  Terence McKenna

  Beautiful, Mind, Duty

  42 Copy quote

• Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

  Terence McKenna

  Government, Information Processing, Dmt

  215 Copy quote

• Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

  Terence McKenna

  Years, Games, People

  34 Copy quote

• Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

  Terence McKenna

  Ego, Psychedelic, Absence

  "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution". Book by Terence McKenna, February 1, 1992.

  69 Copy quote

• We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle

  Terence McKenna

  Mystery, Caught, Riddle

  43 Copy quote

• The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer

  Terence McKenna

  Mind Blowing, Answers, Faces

  81 Copy quote

• Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

  Terence McKenna

  Our World, World, Assumption

  4 Copy quote

• Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, Astonishment, Response

  21 Copy quote

• This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.

  Terence McKenna

  Children, Pain, Moving

  157 Copy quote

• Worrying is betting against yourself.

  Terence McKenna

  Worry, Betting

  57 Copy quote

• The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

  Terence McKenna

  Ego, World, Feminine

  18 Copy quote

• Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Light, Imagination, Empowerment

  52 Copy quote

• Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

  Terence McKenna

  Talking, Proof, Knows

  23 Copy quote

• The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

  Terence McKenna

  Dmt, Mind Blowing, Cost

  92 Copy quote

• The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

  Terence McKenna

  Real, Adventure, Giving

  34 Copy quote

• If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

  Terence McKenna

  Mushrooms, Mind Blowing, Psilocybin

  127 Copy quote

• This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

  Terence McKenna

  Emotional, Long, Culture

  12 Copy quote

• We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

  Terence McKenna

  Jobs, Player, Games

  "Reclaim Your Mind". Part of the Terence McKenna's lecture "Eros and the Eschaton", www.youtube.com. 1984.

  96 Copy quote

• Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

  Terence McKenna

  Mirrors, Ability, Mirror Image

  "Psychedelic Society". Terence McKenna's speech at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, February 1984.

  18 Copy quote

• The only real experience that counts, is your own.

  Terence McKenna

  Real

  20 Copy quote

• To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Animal, Imagination, Mind

  23 Copy quote

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