Terence McKenna Quotes

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

When we look into the human heart we see the lust, the greed, the hate, the pride, the anger, and the jealousies that are so destructive. This is at the heart of the human predicament, and the Scriptures call this condition sin.

As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

I wouldn't like to say that I'm absolutely God conscious. It's like everybody else. We're battling with the forces that are pulling us upwards and downwards at the same time. But basically we all want love, that's what I feel.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul that, struggling to be free, art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay! Bow, stubborn knees! and, heart with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.