Naomi > Naomi's Quotes

“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
― Terence McKenna

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”
― Terence McKenna

“The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer”
― Terence McKenna

“If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”
― Terence McKenna

“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
― Terence McKenna

“Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening”
― Terence McKenna

“We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”
― Terence McKenna

“Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
― Terence McKenna

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. ”
― Alan Watts

“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“I owe my solitude to other people.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.”
― Alan Watts

“In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“Our society at large has lost its ability to distinguish between opinion and fact, and between a threat and an opinion. This is due to the fact that many people are focused on making their opinions into facts—which causes them to react irrationally when others express different opinions, which they perceive as a threat to their personal reality.”
― Zita Steele, Guide to Free Thinking: Stories & Life Lessons

“The best ideas are common property”
― Seneca

“You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
― Plato

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”
― Bill Hicks

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”
― Rollo May