Mikal > Mikal's Quotes

“Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
― Terence McKenna

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century

“Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats’s famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite.”
― Ross Andersen

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“[Y]ou got tuh go there tuh know there.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Words create worlds.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Hell is—other people!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.”
― Jean Paul Sartre

“When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Le diable et le bon dieu

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Cannabis confers agency over the aesthetic constitution of the real.”
― Jason Silva, Sacred Derangement: A field guide to outrageous creativity, radical self-expression and living in awe

“Cannabis, milder than the thunderclap of psilocybin or mescaline, is a subtler sacrament: not the lightning but the shimmer, not the deluge but the dew. It stages wonder as a livable mood.”
― Jason Silva, Sacred Derangement: A field guide to outrageous creativity, radical self-expression and living in awe