Philip K. Dick famous quotes

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

#Atheist #Real #Believe

Everything in life is just for a while.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Life Is

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Depression #Night #Insomnia

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Lying #Self #People

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Inspirational #Life #Reality

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Men #Giving #Beautiful Life

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Secret #Important #Modern Life

How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Sleep #Foolish

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Real #Book #Mind

Reality is just a point of view.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Reality #Views #Point Of View

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Weed #Beer #Wind

There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Technology #Phones

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Writing #Reality #People

I'm not much but I'm all I have.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Responsibility #Optimistic #Optimism

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Real #Views #Two

For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Sentences #Persons

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Home #Wish #Doe

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

#Inspirational #Life #Moving

The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Pain #Hate #Dark

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

#Science #Identity #Shadow

The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Wisdom #People #Want

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Bears #Aspect #Should

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?
-- Philip K. Dick

#Real #Unique #Talking

What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Father #Faces #Scared

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Reality #Links #Strange

It's easy to win. Anybody can win.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Sunset #Winning #Easy

Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Men #Fool #Philosopher

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Terrible #Harder

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Religious #Real #Writing

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

#Education #Humorous #Learning

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Dream #Psychosis #Way

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Tyrants #People #Resistance

All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind
-- Philip K. Dick

#Wind #Degrees #Responsible

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Stars #San Francisco #Car

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Fear #Hate

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Sorry #Writing #Fiction

In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Dark #Long #World

In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Attitude #Military #School

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Meditation #Problem #Ends

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Firsts #Lucky #Certain

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Want #Alive #Existentialism

Reality denied comes back to haunt.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Reality #Psychology

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Moving #Names #World

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore
-- Philip K. Dick

#Mean #Order #People

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Sorry #Writing #Fiction

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Inspirational #Life #Optimistic

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Moving #Errors #Car

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.
-- Philip K. Dick

#Insanity #Teeth #Doe