“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

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.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.

I’m always playing on Sunday, and that’s tough because I really never get to take the sacrament – maybe once every three or four months when I’m home and have a week off.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

It’s great when you meet a girl and three hours later you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve been talking for three hours, what happened to the time?’

You have to put in the work, you can never be satisfied, never take it for granted.

I came in here and a fella asked me to have a drink. I said I don’t drink. Then another fella said hear you and Joe DiMaggio aren’t speaking and I said I’ll take that drink.

I’d love to take a year off and travel the world under the radar. I would love to do it really low key. I wouldn’t need to stay in fancy hotels or anything; I just want to explore – but I don’t know how I’d do it. Would I shave my head to try and go incognito? Ha ha! I’m not telling.