I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
Timothy LearyRead
My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Focus on internal growth and self-awareness before making external changes in your life.
Timothy Leary's quote emphasizes the importance of inner reflection and personal evolution as prerequisites for any meaningful changes in external circumstances. He advocates for a mindset shift, suggesting that to truly engage with life, one must first detach from societal pressures and superficial commitments, thereby enabling genuine self-discovery and transformation.
Themes
Self-AwarenessDetachmentPersonal GrowthMindfulnessInternal Journey
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational seminar discussing personal development.
More from Timothy Leary
All quotes →Think for yourself and question authority.
Timothy LearyRead
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
Timothy LearyRead
The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.
Timothy LearyRead
The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.
Timothy LearyRead
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
Timothy LearyRead
Similar quotes
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Bertrand RussellRead
The great apparent dichotomy is that the more we give, the more we get.
Stephen CoveyRead
No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
Abraham LincolnRead
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
John Maynard KeynesRead
The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.
John CleeseRead
Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices.... Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.
Barbara Brown TaylorRead