Quotes from Luke Rhinehart

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we normally live our lives and we'd sort of like to find out what it is.

You're a classic case of Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving.

Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!' I said with surprising vehemence. 'You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calving Coolidge; death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity.

The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded: they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he lives will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.

Dealing dreams and destruction to a pattern plagued world.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.

Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents.

The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death.

As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless.

But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen.

Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.

Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured

You're all murdering life...You're all trying to change yourselves, all trying to change what is, and thus you're never actually living what is. You're killing who you are every day of your lives by not being who you are...where you are.

Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

All belief is the least reliable form of knowing...Where there is a natural knowing of God, there is not need for belief. The highest form of certainty is something you know so thoroughly and so naturally that it's impossible to put into words.

Human beings are the planets way of committing suicide.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.