Terence McKenna Quotes

The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse — to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.’ Falling Angels

If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know," he went on [...]; "I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.

I started thinking about how life is a lot like getting pushed out of a plane. You didn't ask to be here, none of us did. But we're all careening through space towards an eventual end that no one's gonna be able to put off. That's the only thing that's definite, this impact. So I started to think about how a lot of us fall at an incredible velocity, and it's over in the blink of an eye.

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.