G. I. Gurdjieff Quotes

The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear.

All who have come to me must have enema each day.

Laughter relieves us of superfluous energy, which, if it remained unused, might become negative, that is, poison. Laughter is the antidote.

Begin with the possible; begin with one step.

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.

Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest.

Only super-efforts count.

Man has no individual ‘I’. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small ‘I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, ‘I’. And each time his ‘I’ is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.

A miracle is not the breaking of physical laws, but rather represents laws which are incomprehensible to us.

We must strive for freedom if we strive for self-knowledge. The task of self-knowledge and of further self-development is of such importance and seriousness, it demands such intensity of effort, that to attempt it any old way and amongst other things is impossible. The person who undertakes this task must put it first in his life, which is not so long that he can afford to squander it on trifles.

It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the ‘I Am,’ our real presence, can awaken.