Terence McKenna Quotes

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

I started pulling gags on Al [Pachino]. That was the moment I realized that he was absolutely out of his mind. I mean that he's certifiably insane. I wouldn't spend a night in a room where he's at.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

Have you ever known anyone who was happy? And was still in his right mind, I mean.

What are you thinking? Nothing. I mean...a lot of things. Kind of all at once.

Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.

I just remembered that I'm absent minded... wait, I mean I lost my mind, I can't find it.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

I'm still not sure I didn't hallucinate the conversation while overdosing on his pheromones.

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

No matter where the body is, the mind is free to go elsewhere.

How about Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, our streets, our neighborhoods, our own minds. We don't have to look far - and we should look far as well.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

Would you mind repeating that? I'm afraid I might have lost my wits altogether and just hallucinated what I've longed to hear.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

The eyes see not what is before them when the mind is intent on other matters.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. ... What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.