The Doors of Perception

primeval Nature bears a strange resemblance to that inner world where no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of the enduring concerns of man in general.

And all the rest of the vast landscape is emptiness and silence.

Blake, for example, saw visionary landscapes, ‘articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce’ and ‘infinitely more perfect and minutely organized than anything seen by the mortal eye.’

We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

Familiarity breeds indifference.

Gems are very rare on earth. Few people possess them. To compensate themselves for these facts, the spokesmen for the poverty-stricken majority have filled their imaginary heavens with precious stones.

Most dreams are concerned with the dreamer’s private wishes and instinctive urges, and with the conflicts which arise when these wishes and urges are thwarted by a disapproving conscience or a fear of public opinion.

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.