Timothy Leary Quotes

These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.

Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.

Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get to thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death would be a relief to so endless a state of existence.

I'll just stay in [show business] till they stuff me like Trigger, when I drop dead.

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?

I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.

Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free.

Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world

Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.

Death is like thunder in two particulars; we are alarmed, at the sound of it; and it is formidable only from that which preceded it.

nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

The sense of death is most in apprehension.

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

Death is when the monsters get you.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Why do we cling to life and why are we afraid of death? You may not have thought about it. The reason why we cling so much to life and why we are afraid of death is just inconceivable. We cling to life so much because we do not know how to live. We cling to life so much because really we are not alive. And time is passing and death is coming nearer and nearer. And we are afraid that death is coming near and we have not lived yet.