Top 100 Psychedelic Quotes
#1. Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
Terence McKenna
#2. It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.
Pete Townshend
#3. The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
Terence McKenna
#4. In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
#5. Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there.
Dennis McKenna
#6. The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.
Terence McKenna
#7. The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Terence McKenna
#8. I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.
Terence McKenna
#9. One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.
Terence McKenna
#10. I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything.
Wayne Coyne
#11. Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness ... Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities ... The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
Terence McKenna
#12. The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.
Rick Strassman
#14. FKA Twigs is stunning. She has beautiful contemporary and unique sound with an almost psychedelic vibe. Her music is great for the runway.
Chelsea Leyland
#15. My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today.
Laura Huxley
#16. That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.
Bill Hicks
#17. In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.
John Van Hamersveld
#18. The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
Terence McKenna
#19. If life wasn't real it would be the craziest psychedelic trip ever
Joe Rogan
#20. What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Terence McKenna
#21. I do the protest stuff. I do country and western. I play both acoustic and electric guitar in a lot of different styles, from loud, psychedelic stuff to quiet finger-picking.
Eugene Chadbourne
#22. Express the psychedelic with the cybernetic. Turn on, tune in and boot up.
Timothy Leary
#23. New Rule: Stop putting psychedelic screensavers on computers. I sit down to check my e-mail, and the next thing I know it's three days later, I'm in the desert, I'm banging on a drum, I'm naked, and somebody's pierced my dick.
Bill Maher
#24. There's not enough psychedelic stuff on TV. I want the world to be a bit weirder than it is. I hate reality, so I hate reality TV. But I love Columbo.
Noel Fielding
#25. Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.
Terence McKenna
#26. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.
Alan W. Watts
#27. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
Terence McKenna
#28. I'm on a bus on a psychedelic trip reading murder books tryin' to stay hip.
Billy Idol
#29. I didn't want to make a record that's just drones or completely experimental. A lot of the time bands that make this psychedelic style of music are just a bunch of dudes hanging out together and jamming.
Tamaryn
#30. LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
Timothy Leary
#31. I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.
Stephen Malkmus
#32. Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
Terence McKenna
#33. Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.
Stanislav Grof
#34. One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
Terence McKenna
#35. The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.
Timothy Leary
#36. Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Terence McKenna
#37. The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
Terence McKenna
#38. In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#39. I was looking for something and I wasn't sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses, I had a psychedelic experience where I looked up at the clouds and went, 'Oh!' I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen.
Adam Lambert
#40. I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful ... This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.
Terence McKenna
#41. To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
Terence McKenna
#42. I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
Terence McKenna
#43. I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
#44. Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
#45. Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.
Terence McKenna
#46. Anyone who grew up in the psychedelic '60s probably experienced their share of hypnagogic fireworks. Just as sex got me hooked on anatomy, so drugs were probably what first got me interested in entoptic phenomena, phosphenes, and hypnagogic imagery.
Peter Blegvad
#47. Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.
Duane Michals
#48. When I first started out, I was making really slow, psychedelic ambient music because it was all I could do.
Grimes
#49. What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
#50. By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
#51. My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
Terence McKenna
#52. Psychedelic drugs undoubtedly open the doors to the mind's panopticon, but what we see in the mental mirrors are mere distortions of reality, not reality itself.
Georg Feuerstein
#53. Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.
John Lennon
#54. Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
#55. I remember the day we were hanging around the band's commune and Roger came in with the press kit for a rock band (Moby Grape) any of us had ever seen. It looked psychedelic, yet it was done by ad people. I believe the word "hype" was coined on that very day.
Cynthia Heimel
#56. Memory is just as much of an instrument as anything else in music, so I wanted to create soundscapes that are evocative of places that only exist in your head - that's where the fun, psychedelic stuff happens anyway.
Alan Palomo
#57. Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.
Terence McKenna
#58. So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
Terence McKenna
#59. Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
Terence McKenna
#60. Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.
Alan Moore
#61. I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
Terence McKenna
#62. Neither knew how long they kissed, neither cared. It was difficult to say which one held up the other; both were balanced against each other, as they fell into an abyss filled with psychedelic colors, shooting stars, and the pounding of one heart.
Tallulah Grace
#63. Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.
Terence McKenna
#64. We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.
Daisy Berkowitz
#65. All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.
Terence McKenna
#66. A lot of people trash their subtle physical body with psychedelic drugs. While they do certainly give you experiences in altered levels of attention, you pay a price for it. They definitely screw up the subtle physical. Hatha Yoga can be good for that.
Frederick Lenz
#67. What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
Terence McKenna
#68. I wanted to create something really aggressive and psychedelic
Lykke Li
#70. I believe it's true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event.
Ralph Metzner
#71. Psychedelic spectacles from the middle of The Quibbler. No point now we've
J.K. Rowling
#72. The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.
Terence McKenna
#73. I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
#74. This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
#75. The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
#76. Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Terence McKenna
#77. What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
Terence McKenna
#78. Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.
Terence McKenna
#79. The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
Terence McKenna
#80. When I think about the real pioneers of the psychedelic movement in a musical sense, not just the culture, everything had a handmade sort of vibe to it. We're inventing our culture as we move along into this.
Chris Robinson
#81. The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set.
Terence McKenna
#82. I've got the best parents you could ever ask for. My parents are from New Jersey, and they met in Vermont in college. My Dad grew up listening to heavy, psychedelic music. He's my biggest fan.
King Tuff
#83. Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls.
Ian Astbury
#84. I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
Terence McKenna
#85. Psy Free was a trio consisting of guitar, organ and drums. I was the drummer. We did what the name suggests: psychedelic, free music.
Klaus Schulze
#86. This is not a dress. This is a sacred robe of the ancient psychedelic monks.
Noel Fielding
#87. Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
Terence McKenna
#88. I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.
Terence McKenna
#89. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.
Hunter S. Thompson
#90. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
Hunter S. Thompson
#91. I've been a huge Psychedelic Furs fan for a long time. I love Butler's paintings, too. I like all their songs. I'll even crank 'Pretty in Pink,' I don't care.
Norman Reedus
#92. Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Terence McKenna
#93. At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
Timothy Leary
#94. I formed a band called Atomic Rooster. The Atomic Rooster was sort of an underground cult band, sort of psychedelic. We did very well.
Carl Palmer
#95. Galleries are becoming overwhelmed with psychedelic music/art. I like it; it's a good direction, a new blurring of the lines between what you do.
Brian Chippendale
#96. Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.
Terence McKenna
#98. Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet.
Ray Manzarek
#99. The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.
Terence McKenna
#100. The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.
Terence McKenna
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