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Top 30 William Irwin Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Science is the storytelling of our time.”

1. “Science is the storytelling of our time.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.”

2. “The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.”

3. “In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.”

4. “A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.”

5. “When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.”

6. “But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.”

7. “If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.”

8. “If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.”

9. “Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.”

10. “That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.”

11. “Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.”

12. “Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “I don’t think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.”

13. “I don’t think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.”

14. “For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.”

15. “The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.”

16. “The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.”

17. “The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.”

18. “The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.”

19. “With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.”

20. “Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as “genius” and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.”

21. “It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as “genius” and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.”

22. “The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.”

23. “We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature’s answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.”

24. “Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature’s answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.”

25. “One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.”

26. “Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.”

27. “In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.”

28. “Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “The teacher of history’s work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.”

29. “The teacher of history’s work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.”

— William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson Quote: “Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.”

30. “Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.”

— William Irwin Thompson

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