Philip K. Dick Quotes

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

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.

There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.

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

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.

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

I'm not much but I'm all I have.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people;

they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.

You're killing yourself with cynicism.

Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

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

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy.

It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.

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

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.

We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out.

To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing.

They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

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

In a society of criminals, the innocent man goes to jail.

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

Where there's dope, there's hope!

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

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

No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn't become a crocodile.

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.

I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in 50 AD. . . . Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said.

"There are worse diseases than cancer." "Did he show you slides?" We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected.

Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense

People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

Activity does not necessarily mean life.

When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-- as near as I can figure out, God is dead." Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick.

I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man's life, don't you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.

You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you." "I know," Benteley agreed. "I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.