Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.”

— Philip K. Dick

202. “So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting – do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ’absence of appropriate affect.”

— Philip K. Dick

203. “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.”

— Philip K. Dick

204. “Wake up to a hearty, lip-smacking bowlful of nutritious, nourishing Ubik toasted flakes, the adult cereal that’s more crunchy, more tasty, more ummmish. Ubik breakfast cereal, the whole-bowl taste treat!”

— Philip K. Dick

205. “I almost passed the IQ test,” he said in a low, shaky voice.”

— Philip K. Dick

206. “The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”

— Philip K. Dick

207. “I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man’s life, don’t you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.”

— Philip K. Dick

208. “Mental illness is not funny.”

— Philip K. Dick

209. “As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.”

— Philip K. Dick

210. “He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article.”

— Philip K. Dick

211. “Yet, the dark fire waned: the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism – with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it – could never have reconciled itself to.”

— Philip K. Dick

212. “How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.”

— Philip K. Dick

213. “Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.”

— Philip K. Dick

214. “That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.”

— Philip K. Dick

215. “Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking;.”

— Philip K. Dick

216. “Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

— Philip K. Dick

217. “The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately – and against ordinary experience – vanished. The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.”

— Philip K. Dick

218. “You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.”

— Philip K. Dick

219. “My father told me what it used to feel like, waiting in the dentist’s office. Every time the nurse opened the door you thought, It’s happening. The thing I’ve been afraid of all my life.”

— Philip K. Dick

220. “Italy being a traitor?” His voice grated. “The Duce – he was a clown; we all know that.”

— Philip K. Dick

221. “Maybe I’ll just sit here parked for a while, he decided, and alpha meditate or go into various different altered states of consciousness.”

— Philip K. Dick

222. “The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”

— Philip K. Dick

223. “It’s the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.”

— Philip K. Dick

224. “Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.”

— Philip K. Dick

225. “I remember something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: ‘For a penny,’ the Buddha said, ‘I can board a ferry and do that.’ It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.”

— Philip K. Dick

226. “When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. Now I must seek in other realms.”

— Philip K. Dick

227. “We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?” He inspected Mr. Baynes’ face for his reaction.”

— Philip K. Dick

228. “The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?”

— Philip K. Dick

229. “The door, meagerly, opened and he saw within the apartment a fragmented and misaligned shrinking figure, a girl who cringed and slunk away and yet held onto the door, as if for physical support. Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her and then, with malice, patched her together badly.”

— Philip K. Dick

230. “Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A – there was something about that which absolutely fascinated me.”

— Philip K. Dick

231. “You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?” Zina hesitated. “It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology;.”

— Philip K. Dick

232. “If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.”

— Philip K. Dick

233. “It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.”

— Philip K. Dick

234. “Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.”

— Philip K. Dick

235. “The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men.”

— Philip K. Dick

236. “What is the space which this speaks of? Vertical ascent. To heaven. Of time? Into the light-world of the mutable. Yes, this thing has disgorged its spirit: light. And my attention is fixed; I can’t look away. Spellbound by mesmerizing shimmering surface which I can no longer control. No longer free to dismiss.”

— Philip K. Dick

237. “Is it a loss?” Rachael repeated. “I don’t really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We’re not born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that’s what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren’t really alive.” She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, “I’m not alive!”

— Philip K. Dick

238. “Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.”

— Philip K. Dick

239. “My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’”

— Philip K. Dick

240. “Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed.”

— Philip K. Dick

241. “Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”

— Philip K. Dick

242. “The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths.”

— Philip K. Dick

243. “If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho... even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.”

— Philip K. Dick

244. “Nothing could be more impolite. To say, “Is your sheep genuine?” would be a worse breach of manners.”

— Philip K. Dick

245. “But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”

— Philip K. Dick

246. “Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself finally.”

— Philip K. Dick

247. “Isn’t a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?”

— Philip K. Dick

248. “Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer. Taking the small box, he put the Edfrank jewellery piece away in his coat pocket.”

— Philip K. Dick

249. “Dr Stone wasn’t insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.”

— Philip K. Dick

250. “I’ve been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it’s just not coming again.”

— Philip K. Dick