“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.

Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

Watch! When the wind blows my banner against the bulwark, you shall take it.

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

I take a lot of pride in the work I do, because people pay to see me. They’ve got to get babysitters, park their car, get popcorn and candy. I’ve got to be conscious of that.

There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.