169 "Philip K Dick" Quotes And Sayings

Philip K. Dick was a prolific American science fiction writer, known for his works on and experiments with altered states of consciousness and the philosophy of alternate dimensions and realities. He was an acclaimed writer and is best known for his trippy dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its subsequent film adaptation, Blade Runner (1982). Philip K Read more

Dick's work explores themes such as drug-induced thoughts of persecution, human perception, and state of mind, as well as the intersection of technology and human existence.

1
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. Philip K. Dick
To live is to be haunted.
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To live is to be haunted. Philip K. Dick
If you think this Universe is bad, you should see...
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If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others. Philip K. Dick
This is a mournful discovery.1) Those who agree with you...
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This is a mournful discovery.1) Those who agree with you are insane2) Those who do not agree with you are in power. Philip K. Dick
5
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication. . and there is the real illness. Philip K. Dick
Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.
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Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked. Philip K. Dick
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to...
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Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. Philip K. Dick
Everything is true, ' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever...
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Everything is true, ' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'' Will you be all right?'' I'll be all right, ' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too. Philip K. Dick
We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
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We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine. Philip K. Dick
They ought to make it a binding clause that if...
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They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him. Philip K. Dick
11
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go. But finally, the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him. And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you. Philip K. Dick
12
Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood. Philip K. Dick
The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it...
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The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing? Philip K. Dick
14
But as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall–falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves. Philip K. Dick
15
What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring? What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Philip K. Dick
Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that...
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Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back. Philip K. Dick
17
They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets. Philip K. Dick
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific...
18
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. Philip K. Dick
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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. Philip K. Dick
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I'm not much but I'm all I have. Philip K. Dick