Gurdjieff Quotes

“Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad.”
― Colin Wilson, G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep

“Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets; many who are in their graves are in reality alive.”
― Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

“Study institutions may become visible when the head is more emptied of imaginings.”
― Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

“When you are still fragmentated, lacking certainty — what difference does it make what your decisions are?”
― Idries Shah, The Sufis

“Hay muchas personas caminando por las calles que en realidad están muertas; hay muchas en sus tumbas que están en realidad vivas.”
― Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

“SENTENCES OF THE KHAJAGAN
RUDBARI : Heart to heart is an essential means of passing on the secrets of the Path.”
― Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi

“We have to make a consideration: emotional states are deeply influenced by external events, and here lies the problem. Since the external events are unstable, namely, that they are in perpetual change - a situation that Buddhist tradition defines
as “impermanence” - they are very difficult to be managed, and this bring people to panic.
This difficulty to experience a reality in which nothing is permanent, that all is in constant motion- change, belongs to the human incapacity to accept the discontinuity of an occurrence of events that are always unpredictable and new.
Impermanence is a principle that is a natural thing, but, in relation to the social and interhuman fields, this becomes a problem: especially in the last ten years, we can witness scenarios where instability, turbulence and uncertainty, frantically increase and continue to increase. Instability and change are perceivable everywhere - from the personal interaction between people to economic instability: in poor words, we don’t know what the future will bring to us and we feel a continuous pressure.
People feel a need for safety and stability, but this is an impossible thing in the conditions in which society finds itself, and here lies one of the main reasons why tensions, anxiety, and panic have became common situations.”
― Andrea Dandolo, The Book of "Little Things"

“Las instituciones de estudio se hacen más visibles cuando la cabeza está más vacía de imaginaciones.”
― Idries Shah, Aprender a aprender

“Sentencias de los Khajagan
Rudbari: Corazón a corazón es un medio esencial para transmitir los secretos del Camino.”
― Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi

“Cuando aún estás fragmentado, carente de certezas: ¿qué importa la índole de tus decisiones?”
― Idries Shah, The Sufis

“Do not recall with grief the beautiful hair of the convict's head.”
― Mullah Nassr Eddin

“There is a definite time, a definite term, for everything. Possibilities for everything exist only for a definite time.

Gurdjieff”
― Gurdjieff