My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
—Timothy Leary, 1966
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Quotes
A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878Oh, democracy! Whither are you leading us?
—Aristophanes, 414 BCWe have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
—Tennessee Williams, 1953Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?
—Amy Lowell, 1922Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
—Aldous Huxley, 1929There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCFrom a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 60I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.
—Walt Whitman, 1842Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947I never practice, I always play.
—Wanda Landowska, 1953