“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!”

Reality is made of words.

For all we know, we know nothing.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

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.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

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.

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

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

Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

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.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

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.

Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life and then only in small doses.

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.

I think we need a huge dose of love.

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

Rather than us trying to change girls in order to fit into the common mold of what we think a CEO looks like.

CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement.

And they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

Anything can be achieved with a good, healthy dose of courage.