Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under; it will lift you up.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Optimistic Quotes, Optimism Quotes, Commitment Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes, Quotes About Believing

2. “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Preparation Quotes

3. “We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Intelligent Quotes

4. “Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Quotes About Reality

5. “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Manifestation Quotes, Real Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Quotes About Reality

6. “This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Crazy Quotes, Magic Quotes

7. “Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Smart Quotes

8. “No one knows enough to worry.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Worry Quotes

9. “The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.”

— Terence McKenna

10. “I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.”

— Terence McKenna

11. “What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Quotes About Facts

12. “The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world...”

— Terence McKenna

13. “Astonishment is the proper response to reality.”

— Terence McKenna

14. “Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension.”

— Terence McKenna

15. “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

— Terence McKenna

16. “There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don’t need to work on themselves.”

— Terence McKenna

17. “Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”

— Terence McKenna

18. “What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Real Quotes

19. “The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”

— Terence McKenna

20. “Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won’t. It prefers to be unnamed.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Ego Quotes

21. “Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.”

— Terence McKenna

22. “You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.”

— Terence McKenna

23. “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”

— Terence McKenna

24. “As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.”

— Terence McKenna

25. “Worrying is betting against yourself.”

— Terence McKenna

26. “The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.”

— Terence McKenna

27. “If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.”

— Terence McKenna

28. “The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.”

— Terence McKenna

29. “Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.”

— Terence McKenna

30. “We live in condensations of our imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

31. “You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”

— Terence McKenna

32. “DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.”

— Terence McKenna

33. “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Responsibility Quotes

34. “We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Quotes About Ocean

35. “Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it’s there it doesn’t require your belief- and if it’s not there why should you believe in it?”

— Terence McKenna

36. “The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”

— Terence McKenna

37. “The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.”

— Terence McKenna

38. “This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.”

— Terence McKenna

39. “The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level? of alienation.”

— Terence McKenna

40. “Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

41. “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Ego Quotes

42. “Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”

— Terence McKenna

43. “When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.”

— Terence McKenna

44. “Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.”

— Terence McKenna

45. “I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.”

— Terence McKenna

46. “The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don’t see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It’s beautiful.”

— Terence McKenna

47. “Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”

— Terence McKenna

48. “Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.”

— Terence McKenna

49. “The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.”

— Terence McKenna

50. “Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.”

— Terence McKenna