Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.

Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.

It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.'