Quotes About Gurdjieff

A moment's reflection will show you that you play many roles in the course of a day . . . and that who you are from moment to moment changes. There is the angry you, and the kind you, the lazy you, the lustful you—hundreds of different you's. Gurdjieff points out that sometimes one "you" does something for which all the other "you's" must pay for years or possibly the rest of this life.

The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.

We poke the fires of negativity with memories: past failures, past conflicts, past betrayals and humiliations. Constantly we rake the coals seeking to know the self in the light and heat of their pain. The last thing people will abandon, said Gurdjieff, is their suffering.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

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

If he was to have able pupils and helpful associates as time went on, they would have to find their way to the attitude evoked by Henri Tracol in his response to Luc Dietrich: open to Gurdjieff but psychologically free and self-possessed.

A Teleoghinoora is a materialized idea or thought which after its arising exists almost eternally in the atmosphere of that planet on which it arises.

The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.

Every - real - happiness - for - man - can - arise - exclusively - only - from - some - unhappiness - also - real - which - he - has - already - experienced.

how there are never crystallized in them any subjective being-convictions formed by their own logical deliberations—as in general is proper to three-brained beings—but instead, only those convictions are crystallized that depend exclusively upon the opinions of others.

Gurdjieff says, 'You can never stop associations. As long as you breathe, there are associations. These are automatic. . . . you must not try to stop them; let associations flow but not be active .

As to Gurdjieff's power to renew his own energies, its essence had been understood by psychologists of the nineteenth century, decades before the age of Freud and Jung. William James speaks about it in an important essay called 'The Energies of Man'.

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism