Timothy Leary Quotes

Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Surfers are the ‘throw-aheads’ of mankind, not the dregs; they aren’t the black sheep of humanity, but the futurists and they are leading the way to where man ultimately wants to be. The act of the ride is the epitome of ‘be here now’, and the tube ride is the most acute form of that. Which is: your future is right ahead of you, the past is exploding behind you, your wake is disappearing, your footprints are washed from the sand. It’s a non-productive, non-depletive act that’s done purely for the value of the dance itself. And that is the destiny of man.

Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.

Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.

I declare that The Beatles are mutants.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.

Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.

I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.

Tune in, turn on, and drop out.

My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

I think that marijuana makes you stupid but sensual. I've watched many of my friends and loved ones become more erotic and dumber - just going around with a glazed expression on their faces from their last orgasms to the next - and found them really quite boring.

Science is all metaphor.

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

Man's best friend is his dogma.

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos

There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.

Give death a better name or die trying.

At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.

My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new.

Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.

When you get the message, hang up the phone.

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.

Remember also: beyond the restless flowing electricity of life is the ultimate reality- The Void. Your own awareness, not formed into anything possessing form or color, is naturally void. The Final Reality. The All Good. The All Peaceful. The light. The Radiance. The movement is the fire of life from which we all come. Join it. It is part of you.

Half the things I've done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn't have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

TURN ON. to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. TUNE IN. to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. DROP OUT. detach yourself from the tribal game. current models of social adjustement - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill.

Information is Power. Think For Yourself. CAUTION: proper use of the brain is not endorsed by federal governments nor huge corporations involved in serious financial profit from a brainwashed and enslaved population. Mild discomfort may occur as confusing independent thought challenges popular views of the world.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

Express the psychedelic with the cybernetic. Turn on, tune in and boot up.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

Think for yourself and question authority.

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.

Romantic poetry and fiction of the last 2000 years has blinded us to the fact that emotions are a low form of jungle consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, dangerous form of fanatic stupor.

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities - the political, the religious, the educational authorities - who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing - forming in our minds - their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Science is all metaphor. In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. If you don't like what you are doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Acid is not for every brain .... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.