Quote

As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.

Terence McKenna

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
Side
Struggle
Sides
Call
Implacable
Whatever
Novelty
Force
Cosmos
Two
Forces
Habit

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
Terence McKenna
Image
Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
Terence McKenna
Image
The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.
Terence McKenna
Image
Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.
Terence McKenna
Image
I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there
Terence McKenna
Image
I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
Terence McKenna
Image
I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
Image
A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
Terence McKenna
Image
The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.
Terence McKenna
Image
You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
Terence McKenna
Image
My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
Terence McKenna
Image
People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.
Terence McKenna
Image
It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.
Terence McKenna
Image
We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].
Terence McKenna
Image
A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.
Terence McKenna
Image
We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.
Terence McKenna
Image
In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
Terence McKenna
Image
I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
Terence McKenna