Philip K. Dick Quotes - Page 2

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don't.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus.

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.

This is a mournful discovery. 1)Those who agree with you are insane 2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.

Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.

Either I've invented a whole new logic or, ahem, I'm not playing with a full deck.

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.