Terence McKenna Quotes

And I might add the confidence with which distracted persons do oftentimes, when they are awake, think, they see black fiends in places, where there is no black object in sight without them.

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

There are conditions worse than being unable to see, and that is imagining one sees.

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

With mania, is it dangerous to ride that euphoric feeling. You feel very animated and creative; I would fill journals with drawings. It feels good and you want it to last, but it can lead to being delusional. The delusions can be as real as you thinking you can fly.

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

In a psychiatric hospital, a lot of people believe that people on TV are talking to them directly through the screen. I'm with about 500 of these people, and I'm on TV every Friday night. As I was queuing up for breakfast one morning, one guy nearly jumped out of his skin. My first thought was to go 'Woooo!'

The fool is like those people who think themselves rich with little.

The spookiest thing for me is when I think I see something, and then nothing is there. I always imagine I see something, or I'll catch movement out of the corner of my eye, but nothing is really there.

… the ravings of a maniac

The capacity of this body for self delusion appears to this Senator to be unlimited.

... a paranoid person with delusions.

Prejudices were deeply rooted; the people really believed themselves to be the richest of the world, even though they lived in destitution. They took the potentialities of the country for actual wealth.

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

I have the craziest dreams when I'm digesting a massive amount. It feels so real, it's psychedelic.

I'm delirious. Spots are crawling before my eyes." "Those are spiders.

If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that's the bunk. It's little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.