Terence McKenna Quotes

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

I'm a big fan of the digestive system.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.

I'm lucky to have a fast metabolism, so I haven't had to exercise much.

I don't have a problem with being overweight. That's fine. But there's a thin line between being unhealthy and overweight.

Luckily, I have a fast metabolism.

It would be nice if I had a faster metabolism, because I love food.

Even one hair has a shadow.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

The shadows didn't seem as dark as usual. Not with my personal sun along.

Our days on earth are like a shadow, and the time of our affliction is the length of our days.

Each time you put the muscle back on, your body has that muscle memory and wants to hang on to it, so you just have be well underfed and over-trained to get it off and it's exhausting.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.

All the forces that are working in this body have been produced out of food; we see that every day.

Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.

It is possible to transcend the usual limitations of the body, ego, space, and linear time.

I rode, and I rode, and I rode. I rode like I had never ridden, punishing my body up and down every hill I could find. I rode when no one else would ride.

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

I like to help others and count it as my greatest pleasure in life to see a person free himself of the shadows which darken his days. These shadows look so thick to him and weigh him down so that when he finds they are shadows and that he can see through them, walk through them and be again in the sun, he is enormously delighted. And I am afraid I am just as delighted as he is.