Peter Lamborn Wilson Quotes

“Love, then, is the binding power of being, on every level of reality. In fact, love is being and reality: love turning toward love in love with itself. Everything is on this track, and everything being/consciousness/bliss, whether it "knows" itself as such or not. But the soul which awakens and finds itself in the dance: that soul has won the bet.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“The "peace" which Islam seeks in its arts arises not from hatred of the image, but rather from an alchemical spiritualization or sublimation of the senses. All Islamic art implies an Image, but one that cannot be openly stated: the Image of the One. Islamic art asks us to use our Imagination in an active relation between art-object and viewer, to allow the object to evoke our own creative apperception of Oneness.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“And Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“There are some people who do not need fifteen seconds on the Evening News to validate their existence.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson

“Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head, don't sign up for the armies of anorexia or bulimia - act as if you were already free, calculate the odds, step out, remember the Code Duello - Smoke Pot /Eat Chicken/ Drink Tea.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the "isms" of this world are old and rusty tools which I don't need or mind anymore. My principle is life, my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely for to embrace my life tragically.

You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with you for awhile. But when you stop, I shall continue on my insane and triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!

Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin thoughts - they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion!
I shall be among them!

And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: "So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves!”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“To be a '"free lord" in secret is better than being a public slave”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“Art has little to do with made things, but rather concerns a state of mind, a way of being, a gesture that cannot be betrayed, a life.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“Art has little to do with made things, but rather concerns a state of mind, a way of being, a gesture that cannot be betrayed, a life”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“When you say the name of Khezr (or Khadir) in company you should always add the greeting "Salaam aliekum!" since he may be there - immortal and anonymous, engaged on some mysterious karmic errand. Perhaps he'll hint of his identity by wearing green, or by revealing knowledge of the occult and hidden. But he's something of a spy, and if you have no need to know he's unlikely to tell you. Still, one of his functions is to convince skeptics of the existence of the marvelous, to rescue those who are lost in deserts of doubt and dryness. So he's needed now more than ever, and surely still moves among us playing his great game.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“If modern dervishes are no more than
"traditional hippies," still I feel that the world has a secret but absolute need for the presence of such wild free spirits, just as it needs the presence of some wilderness, unplanned, unmanaged, apparently profitless, chaotic as God first made it. (And both of these needs seem to fall under the patronage of the master traveler, Khezr himself).”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“For the Sufi Traveler, every journey is the haji, every tajalli is the Kaaba. Every path, if it be properly understood, is the Path; every way, however fraught with difficulty, can be experienced as a "straight" path to realization.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“It is always morning, the caravan is always departing. All we can do is share the Prophet's prayer - "O Lord increase our amazement" - and set forth into the Bewilderness.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“The blind panopticon of capital remains after all, most vulnerable in the realm of ‘magic’ - the manipulation of images to control events, hermitic ‘action at a distance’.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Millennium

“Kidnap someone & make them happy.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day- otherwise they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns you can't stay up on the roof forever - but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred -a difference is made.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone