11 quotes
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.
The Doors of Perception (1954)
Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.
The Doors of Perception (1954)