Luke Rhinehart > Quotes

“ Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“With determination and dice, I am God.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a lvel of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Nature’s accidents are the universe’s way of throwing chance into a system which would die of too much orderliness. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions are all Mother Nature’s way of stirring up the pot to prevent stagnation and putrefaction.
A world without them would be a world of death. Floods, fires, eruptions, earthquakes all destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
So too riots, revolutions and wars are societies’ ways of throwing chance into their systems, which are dying of too much orderliness. And like nature’s eruptions, these too destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
And so too with individuals. Human beings need in their lives earthquakes and floods and riots and revolutions, or we grow as rigid and unmoving as corpses.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“You’re a classic case of Horney’s: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!’ I said with surprising vehemence. ‘You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calving Coolidge; death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded: they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he lives will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“And it's his illusions about what
constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed”
― Luke Rhineheart

“There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we normally live our lives and we'd sort of like to find out what it is.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“Dealing dreams and destruction to a pattern plagued world.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“À partir de là, le dialogue de la journée suivait une pente uniformément descendante, mais avec des lèvres et des mains chaleureuses et languides flottant sur les surface les plus sensibles du corps, le monde était aussi près que possible de la perfection. Freud appelait cela un état de perversité polymorphe impersonnel et le regardait d'un mauvais oeil, mais je doute fort qu'il ait jamais eu les mains de Lil lui frôlant le corps. Ou même celles de sa propre femme dans le même rôle. Freud était un bien grand homme, mais je n'arrive pas à me faire à l'idée que quelqu'un lui ait jamais efficacement flatté le pénis.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless.”
― Luke Rhinehart

“Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what
Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“One desire, my friends, one: to kill yourself. You must desire this. You must feel that a voyage of discovery is more important than all the little trips which the normal consumer self wants to buy.”
― luke rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self - a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“You're all murdering life...You're all trying to change yourselves, all trying to change what is, and thus you're never actually living what is. You're killing who you are every day of your lives by not being who you are...where you are.”
― Luke Rhinehart