Carlos Castaneda Quotes

The ego is like a tired old dog. We can never kill it, so put it out on the back porch, let it rest there, and step around it.

Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.

The art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.

Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do

We're a feeling, an awareness encased here

We don't need more to be thankful for, we just need to be more thankful.

Intent is what can make a man succeed when his thoughts tell him that he is defeated.

A guardian is broad-minded and understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic.

You see all of us go through the same doubts. We are afraid of being mad; unfortunately for us, of course, all of us are already mad.

Leave Jesus on the cross. He's very happy there!

The spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only warriors are consistently attuned to such revelations.

When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become.

A warrior seeks to act rather than talk.

To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control

My benefactor used to say the seeds are the 'sober head'
the only part that could fortify the heart of man.

The fact of the matter is that many children see ... Most of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to correct them.

Heightened awareness is a mystery only for a reason.

A warrior never worries about his fear.

Man has a dark side, yes, and it is called stupidity.

For a human being, sadness is as powerful as terror. Sadness makes a warrior shed tears of blood.

I'm afraid you will have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain.

The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.

Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge.

Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.

If you were a warrior, you would know that the worst thing one can do is confront human beings directly.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands.

Your problems is that you think you have time

Sorcerers are convinced that all of us are a bunch of nincompoops. We can never relinquish our crummy control voluntarily, thus we have to be tricked

We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.

We have to balance the lineality of the known universe with the nonlineality of the unknown universe.

Well being is a condition one has to groom, a condition one has to become aquainted with in order to seek it

If one is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever must be learned must be learned the hard way.

The art of being a warrior is to balance the wonder and the terror of being alive.

In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

There's no emptiness in the life of a warrior. Everything is filled to the brim. Everything is filled to the brim, and everything is equal.

When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to.

Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on

The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die.

The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people

Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.

The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

Learn to see, and then you'll know that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.

Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has momentarily been interrupted by extraneous forces.

This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it

Beware of those who weep with realization, for they have realized nothing.

Self importance is man's greatest enemy.

The secret is not in what you do to yourself but rather in what you don't do.

Nothing is pending in the world ... nothing is finished, yet nothing is unresolved ... Everything is filled to the brim.

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Crows are not always available to give warning.

You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.

You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.

For my teachers, unfortunately, certain things were, as they are for you, only tales of power

Things don't change, only the way you look at them.

Do you know at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity if you so desire?

All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has heart.

We chose whether to be warriors or to be ordinary.

The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be.

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I.
Don Juan Matus

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

As long as a man feels that he is the most important thing in the world he cannot really appreciate the world around him.

One should never turn to one's left when facing the nagual.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Never take a path that has no heart in it. You can't lose if your heart is in your work, but you can't win if your heart is not in it.

The warrior: silent in his struggle, undetainable because he has nothing to lose, functional and efficacious because he has everything to gain.

A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.

Will is what can make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're defeated.

One can say that the nagual accounts for creativity. The nagual is the only part of us that can create.

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over walls; they don't demolish them.

You're chained to you reason ... Understanding is only a very small affair, so very small

Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because it is the nature of his lot, for good or bad.

It takes all the time and all the energy we have to conquer the idiocy in us

Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so ... because we learn what to perceive.

We are men and our lot in life is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.

Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.

It doesn't matter how one was brought up. What determines the way one does anything is personal power.

When you need an answer, look over your left shoulder and ask your death.

I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.

The body must be perfection before the will is a functioning unit

It was stupidity that forced us to discard anything that did not conform with ourself - reflective expectations.

The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.

Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all

Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He,

To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.

A man of knowledge chooses a path with a heart and follows it and then he looks and rejoices and laughs and then he sees and knows.

A warrior could not avoid pain and grief but only the indulging in them

The fate of all of us here has been to know that we are prisoners of power. No one knows why us in particular, but what a great fortune!

A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing, when in effect he knows nothing.