To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.