Luke Rhinehart Quotes & Sayings

We are blind to the worlds within us, waiting to be born. — Luke Rhinehart

As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless. — Luke Rhinehart

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. — Luke Rhinehart

All belief is the least reliable form of knowing ... Where there is a natural knowing of God, there is not need for belief. The highest form of certainty is something you know so thoroughly and so naturally that it's impossible to put into words. — Luke Rhinehart

You're all murdering life ... You're all trying to change yourselves, all trying to change what is, and thus you're never actually living what is. You're killing who you are every day of your lives by not being who you are ... where you are. — Luke Rhinehart

The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. — Luke Rhinehart

We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. — Luke Rhinehart

The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded: they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he lives will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots. — Luke Rhinehart

And it's his illusions about what
constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him ... His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed — Luke Rhinehart

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert. — Luke Rhinehart

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen. — Luke Rhinehart

Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus. — Luke Rhinehart

Dealing dreams and destruction to a pattern plagued world. — Luke Rhinehart

'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material. — Luke Rhinehart

Men must attempt to develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self.
Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and
consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. — Luke Rhinehart

Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair. — Luke Rhinehart

Nature's accidents are the universe's way of throwing chance into a system which would die of too much orderliness. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions are all Mother Nature's way of stirring up the pot to prevent stagnation and putrefaction.
A world without them would be a world of death. Floods, fires, eruptions, earthquakes all destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
So too riots, revolutions and wars are societies' ways of throwing chance into their systems, which are dying of too much orderliness. And like nature's eruptions, these too destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
And so too with individuals. Human beings need in their lives earthquakes and floods and riots and revolutions, or we grow as rigid and unmoving as corpses. — Luke Rhinehart

Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself. — Luke Rhinehart

I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn't seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently. — Luke Rhinehart

Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!' I said with surprising vehemence. 'You, me, the most rocklike personality since Calving Coolidge; death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is insanity. — Luke Rhinehart

Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness. — Luke Rhinehart

Part of the philosophy of 'The Dice Man' is that you have got to be laughing at yourself at every moment and be free of yourself at every moment. — Luke Rhinehart

Every man's personal proverb about himself is: "Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people." The — Luke Rhinehart

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. — Luke Rhinehart

It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane. — Luke Rhinehart

You're a classic case of Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving. — Luke Rhinehart

Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what
Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight. — Luke Rhinehart

With determination and dice, I am God. — Luke Rhinehart

New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a lvel of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought. — Luke Rhinehart

Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured — Luke Rhinehart

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self. — Luke Rhinehart

When I was a young man, barely 18, I discovered Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, and for six months I told my mother she was damned to hell. That wasn't much fun. I abandoned it. — Luke Rhinehart

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. — Luke Rhinehart

I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name. — Luke Rhinehart

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved. — Luke Rhinehart

Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,' Dr Rhinehart went on, 'it seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr Raymond Felt has observed: "The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed 'cures' by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century. — Luke Rhinehart

I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. — Luke Rhinehart

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book. — Luke Rhinehart

From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure. — Luke Rhinehart

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive. — Luke Rhinehart

But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen. — Luke Rhinehart