These Ken Kesey quotes will inspire you. Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Ken Kesey quotes, Ken Kesey sayings, and Ken Kesey proverbs.
Best Ken Kesey Quotes
- “Since we don’t know where we’re going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “If you’ve got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you’ve got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.” ~ Ken Kesey , Ken Kesey quotes love
- “The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “It is just as much an offense to take offense as it is to give offense.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “You can’t blame the President for the state of the country, it’s always the poets’ fault. You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “LSD lets you in on something. When you’re tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don’t even know what species you are sometimes. And I don’t know of anybody who hasn’t come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding.” ~ Ken Kesey”
- He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum” ~ Ken Kesey
- “People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “There’s no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure’s not so bad As never having tried.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “To be just without being mad (and the madder you get the madder you get), to be peaceful without being stupid, to be interested without being compulsive, to be happy without being hysterical… smoke grass.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “To hell with facts! We need stories.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?” ~ Ken Kesey
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“I’ve found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “People don’t want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Marvelous wonders don’t have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time like crystals growing, or minds changing or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don’t slip by unappreciated.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “I’ve enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“Always stay in your own movie.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.” ~ Ken Kesey , Ken Kesey quotes mystery
- “See with your ears and hear with your eyes.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “There’ve been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“Take what you can use and let the rest go by.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Luckily, I remembered something Malcolm Cowley had taught us at Stanford – perhaps the most important lesson a writing class (not a writer, understand, but a class) can ever learn. ‘Be gentle with one another’s efforts,’ he often admonished us. ‘Be kind and considerate with your criticism. Always remember that it’s just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.'” ~ Ken Kesey
- “I’d take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“Your trouble is, you keep trying to unscrew the inscrutable.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “If you’re a Conservative, why aren’t you behind conserving the land?” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Living is the purpose of life,
And meaning can be found therein.
I finds thou.
Thou becomes it.
And it begins again.” ~ Ken Kesey - “The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you’re a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?” ~ Ken Kesey
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“Now, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “It’s time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We’ve reached a certain point, but we’re not moving anymore.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “If this glorious birth to death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have ..if our grand exhilarating fight of life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after-then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?” ~ Ken Kesey
- “You’re just a young kid. What are you doin’ here? You oughta be out in a convertible, why… bird-doggin’ chicks and bangin’ beaver. What are ya doin’ here, for Christ’s sake? What’s funny about that? Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothin’ but complain about how you can’t stand it in this place here, and then you haven’t got the guts just to walk out!” ~ Ken Kesey
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“Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “If you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “There’s something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “No, that nurse ain’t some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em, old and young, men and women. Seen ’em all over the country and in the homes- people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin’ you where it hurts the worst.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“The frontiers we broke into in the ’60s are still largely unexplored.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “There are going to be times when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place — then it won’t make a damn.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.” ~ Ken Kesey
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“The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “What the Chronics are – or most of us – are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.” ~ Ken Kesey
- “We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.” ~ Ken Kesey
