Timothy Leary Quotes

At which point should we let go and do what we want to do, and when should we submit to rules? Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it fascinates me.

There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there is isn't.

You just get out there and be what you want to be. That's part of evolving and part of staying true to yourself - part of remaining alive in a real authentic, long-term sense creatively: not listening to what other people tell you to be.

I think there's always a conflict within me about being comfortable and secure and then being an individual and fighting for what I want to be on an individual basis.

The day you realize you don't have to make sense to anyone is the day you start to make sense to you.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

In order to realize our true self we must be willing to live without being dependent upon the opinion of others.

Never follow anybody else's idea - that is very dangerous because you will become imitative. Always follow your own nature, self-nature; only then will you attain to freedom. It is better to die following one's nature than to live following somebody's else's nature, because that will be a pseudo life. To die following one's nature is beautiful, because that death too will be authentic.

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

People have to learn who they are - you can't have somebody else telling you who you are.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

I choose to express myself.

He who integrates is lost.

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you. And then that's what you have to be. But what I'm looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

When you don't inherit an identity you have to define it on your own.

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.

I tell my son Corey that the greatest teacher is the teacher who says, 'Don't follow me; follow yourself. Because within you there is that kingdom, that life, that force.'