Terence McKenna Quotes

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

I think, therefore I am.

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.

The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

There are no indisputable truths.

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.

When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?