Terence McKenna Quotes

It is impossible to imagine a four-dimensional space. I personally find it hard enough to visualize a three-dimensional space!

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real - a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

You leave space for the body, imagining the other part even though it isn't there.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Whatever colors you have in your mind, I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.

It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.

Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

Katie smiled and turned away, knowing it wasn't an illusion or a figment of her imagination. She knew what she saw. She knew what she believed.

The power of imagination created the illusion that my vision went much farther than the naked eye could actually see.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

I am not just what I remember. I am also what I dream.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.