Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it’s hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.”

— Terence McKenna

102. “We have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it’s time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.”

— Terence McKenna

103. “Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That’s where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.”

— Terence McKenna

104. “Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.”

— Terence McKenna

105. “If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity, you are going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions but it is not paved with clarity.”

— Terence McKenna

106. “We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”

— Terence McKenna

107. “All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.”

— Terence McKenna

108. “When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement.”

— Terence McKenna

109. “Death is the black hole of biology. It’s an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.”

— Terence McKenna

110. “The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”

— Terence McKenna

111. “The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.”

— Terence McKenna

112. “To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

113. “So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.”

— Terence McKenna

114. “Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that’s the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.”

— Terence McKenna

115. “To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”

— Terence McKenna

116. “We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.”

— Terence McKenna

117. “We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.”

— Terence McKenna

118. “It’s a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.”

— Terence McKenna

119. “Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.”

— Terence McKenna

120. “Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

— Terence McKenna

121. “The only real experience that counts, is your own.”

— Terence McKenna

122. “The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That’s the odd paradox of it.”

— Terence McKenna

123. “I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.”

— Terence McKenna

124. “All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.”

— Terence McKenna

125. “Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.”

— Terence McKenna

126. “If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.”

— Terence McKenna

127. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

— Terence McKenna

128. “Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.”

— Terence McKenna

129. “The human brain is the god of technological innovation.”

— Terence McKenna

130. “Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.”

— Terence McKenna

131. “Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it’s no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.”

— Terence McKenna

132. “Time will perfect matter.”

— Terence McKenna

133. “There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.”

— Terence McKenna

134. “Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

135. “Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.”

— Terence McKenna

136. “That’s the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.”

— Terence McKenna

137. “We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle.”

— Terence McKenna

138. “The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.”

— Terence McKenna

139. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

— Terence McKenna

140. “Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”

— Terence McKenna

141. “Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.”

— Terence McKenna

142. “Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.”

— Terence McKenna

143. “And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.”

— Terence McKenna

144. “The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.”

— Terence McKenna

145. “An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.”

— Terence McKenna

146. “The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.”

— Terence McKenna

147. “Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.”

— Terence McKenna

148. “LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It’s not a personality.”

— Terence McKenna

149. “If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.”

— Terence McKenna

150. “I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.”

— Terence McKenna