Dan Freedom > Dan's Quotes

“Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.”
― Alan Watts

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
― Ken Kesey

“I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
― Heraclitus

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I've tried

to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me.”
― Stephen Dunn

“The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
― Charles Addams

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”
― Steven Moffat

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
― Nikola Tesla

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
― Carl Jung

“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”
― Alan Watts

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I used to be indecisive but now I am not quite sure.”
― Tommy Cooper

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Don’t just teach your children to read…
Teach them to question what they read.
Teach them to question everything.”
― George Carlin