Mickey > Mickey's Quotes

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts

“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.”
― John Lennon

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.”
― Alan Watts

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
― Alan Watts

“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. ”
― Gore Vidal

“I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.”
― Jack Kerouac

“If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“It's a long, arduous road he's starting to travel, but it may be that at the end of it he'll find what's he's seeking.”
― Somerset Maughm, The Razor’s Edge

“The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her.
"Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;
drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.
Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:
by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.”
― Po Chu-i, The Selected Poems of Po Chü-i

“Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
― Alan Watts

“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”
― Alan Watts

“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts