““Hasn’t all this taught you anything?” Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum’s return and report.
“Like what?”
“That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.”
Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 13 (p. 226)
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Philip K. Dick 278
American author 1928–1982Related quotes
Cheon Il Guk is the Ideal Heavenly Kingdom of Eternal Peace http://www.unification.net/2006/20060613_1.html (2006-06-13)
As quoted in No Commercial Potential : The Saga of Frank Zappa (1972) by David Walley, p. 4.
“The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Be Here Now (1971)
Context: Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn't label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn't make it, that the psychologists didn't really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren't getting to the crux of the matter.
My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being "objective" for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out....
Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn't know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn't add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable.
“That's what being eccentric means--being natural.”
"2017 Maps of Meaning 12: Final: The Divinity of the Individual" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V1eMvGGcXQ&t=0s
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