Quote

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

William Irwin Thompson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Human
Cultural
Humans
Transformation
First
Global
Enough
Evolution
Long
Player
Mind
Individual
Constituent
Time
Culture
Constituents
Life
Firsts
Swift

More quotes by William Irwin Thompson

Image
One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as genius and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The conscious process is reflected in the imagination the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Science is the storytelling of our time.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
But the time has come the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
William Irwin Thompson