Quote

For all we know, we know nothing.

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
Nothing

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
We live in condensations of our imagination
Terence McKenna
Image
This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don't want to clench, you don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation ... most of the time.
Terence McKenna
Image
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
Terence McKenna
Image
Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.
Terence McKenna
Image
I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
Terence McKenna
Image
Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Terence McKenna
Image
The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
Image
Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.
Terence McKenna
Image
The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are going through the eye of the needle make sure you leave what you don't need behind
Terence McKenna
Image
The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
Terence McKenna
Image
I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
Terence McKenna
Image
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
Terence McKenna
Image
For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
Terence McKenna
Image
The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
Image
Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
Terence McKenna