“What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.”
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Terence McKenna 111
American ethnobotanist 1946–2000Related quotes
"Of Hemispheres, which are infinite; and which are divided by an infinite number of Lines, so that every Man always has one of these Lines between his Feet."
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings
Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 8, “The Importance of Saying No” (pp. 177-178)
“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
“Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions.”
"Introduction"
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
Context: Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds.
Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory.