Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “For all we know, we know nothing.”

— Terence McKenna

202. “The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.”

— Terence McKenna

203. “The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.”

— Terence McKenna

204. “The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

205. “The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.”

— Terence McKenna

206. “We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.”

— Terence McKenna

207. “There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

— Terence McKenna

208. “We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.”

— Terence McKenna

209. “What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.”

— Terence McKenna

210. “What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.”

— Terence McKenna

211. “Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we’ve managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

— Terence McKenna

212. “I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.”

— Terence McKenna

213. “We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.”

— Terence McKenna

214. “Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.”

— Terence McKenna

215. “There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.”

— Terence McKenna

216. “The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.”

— Terence McKenna

217. “The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”

— Terence McKenna

218. “Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.”

— Terence McKenna

219. “Mind conjures miracles out of time.”

— Terence McKenna

220. “If you’re truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.”

— Terence McKenna

221. “Everything will come true in cyberspace. That’s the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it’s simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.”

— Terence McKenna

222. “Authority will lead you into ruin.”

— Terence McKenna

223. “Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.”

— Terence McKenna

224. “The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.”

— Terence McKenna

225. “Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.”

— Terence McKenna

226. “The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.”

— Terence McKenna

227. “Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.”

— Terence McKenna

228. “In cyberspace things are built out of light.”

— Terence McKenna

229. “It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”

— Terence McKenna

230. “The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Real Quotes

231. “The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.”

— Terence McKenna

232. “Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.”

— Terence McKenna

233. “I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.”

— Terence McKenna

234. “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the ‘limit text’ of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.”

— Terence McKenna

Featured in: Book Quotes

235. “The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”

— Terence McKenna

236. “We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.”

— Terence McKenna

237. “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”

— Terence McKenna

238. “The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”

— Terence McKenna

239. “You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.”

— Terence McKenna

240. “If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.”

— Terence McKenna

241. “What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.”

— Terence McKenna

242. “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.”

— Terence McKenna

243. “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

— Terence McKenna

244. “The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.”

— Terence McKenna

245. “Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let’s try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!”

— Terence McKenna

246. “We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.”

— Terence McKenna

247. “Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.”

— Terence McKenna

248. “There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.”

— Terence McKenna

249. “Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.”

— Terence McKenna

250. “A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It’s changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it’s changing, and there are many many possibilities.”

— Terence McKenna