Ken Kesey Quotes

Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose-- What is gone is gone.

Where there is clarity, there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. But then, why should I speak, since I know nothing?

Be patient with all that is uncertain in your heart...do not search for answers, which will not be given: you will not be able to live them, and its importat to live everything.

You don't need to suffer anymore. You've suffered enough to take you to this point where you hear the words, "You don't need to suffer anymore," and you understand them. You recognize their truth and you then see that you do have a choice ­ that you can surrender to the suchness of now, which means every moment to relinquish resistance and if it still arises, to recognize it.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

...Choice in every form is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery.

The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

We should all relax about life because you don't have a clue as to what's really going on.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

Some things you just don't get over.

I have quite a robust relationship with regret. You simply don't know what the alternative would have been.

There is such a choice of difficulties, that I own myself at a loss how to determine

I'm in a space of surrendering and being open and seeing. It's a good place to be - the only place to be.

For every story you hear that's tragic, there's another that's equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life.

In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand - relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.

Yet never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant it more firmly in place. Have I not told you all thought is creative?

Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an argument with the past.

Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand. It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be. It is a let-go.

Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.