Terence McKenna Quotes

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Language does our thinking for us.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit.

People always say, when did you realize you were funny? And I think it's not that you realize you were funny. It's that you're brain works in a certain way. And I don't think that that's - I think in some respects it's uncontrollable, and you can either accept it and deal with it and hone it or you can try to fight it. And I was too weak to fight it.

I think the power of the mind is amazing, and we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.