Terence McKenna Quotes

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

History is an angel being blown backwards into the future

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

It is your understanding that is going to change your reality.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.

I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.

History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

So when people ask me if I believe God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation--Time.

Earth's blackest day and earth's brightest day are only three days apart.

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.

And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you." You said the other day life was long," I shot back. "Which is it?" It's both," she said, shrugging. "It all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing." Nothing can be two opposite things at once," I said. "It's impossible." No," she replied, squeezing my hand, "what's impossible is that we actually think it could be anything OTHER than that.

There is nothing in the whole world which abides. All things are in a state of ebb and flow, and every shadow passes away. Even time itself, like a river, is constantly gliding away .

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

I came to Nantes two-years-ago and it's much the same today, except that it's totally different.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

The past is made out of facts...I guess the future is just hope.