R. D. Laing Quotes

A woman I should like to think I know rather well and a woman I had always considered a mystery, are in fact the same person.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

I've always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick; I love his work. There's a returning theme of identity and the fragility of our identity. Even when we are looking at what we think is a stark reality, it might actually be something completely different.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality.

The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

To accept duality is to earn identity.

The mind turned inwards is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world. Cotton made into various clothes we call by various names. Gold made into various ornaments, we call by various names. But all the clothes are cotton and all the ornaments gold. The one is real, the many are mere names and forms.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.

I think and that is all that I am.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

No matter how you travel, it's still you going.

To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

You can either see yourself as a wave in the ocean or you can see yourself as the ocean.

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.