Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.