That’s what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever’s in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it…

You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty...

If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must...

Insane people — psychologically defined, not legally define — are not in touch with reality.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be...

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence–a series of words–which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the...

It’s easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you...

What you should do,” she told Fat during one of his darker hours, “is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.” Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a...

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John...

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into...

Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he...

Guilt — if there was any guilt — spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of...

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought … Probably she’s the...

I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I...

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I...

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. “You have to let me in,” he says. “I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?”...

Io posso fare di meglio; posso metterla in commercio.

Everything is true,’ he said. ‘Everything anybody has ever thought.”Will you be all right?”I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.

David Hume, the great­est skep­tic of them all, once remarked that after a gath­er­ing of skep­tics met to pro­claim the verac­i­ty of skep­ti­cism as a phi­los­o­phy, all of the mem­bers of the gath­er­ing nonethe­less left...

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings...

You’re an unusual person,” she said.”Bill didn’t like you, but he never likes anything different. He’s so—so prosaic. Don’t you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened in his outlook?

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance...

We didn’t have sense enough to take care of it. Now it’s torn. And the artist is dead.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before...

It isn’t a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the highest goal of man – the need to grow and advance . . . to find...

I have seen myself backward.

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine-

We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected....

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed...

Cancer… the process of creation gone wild, I thought.

There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time,...

every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

The most dangerous kind of person… is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

You mean old books?””Stories written before space travel but about space travel.””How could there have been stories about space travel before –“”The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.