Maurice Nicoll (1884 – 1953) was a Scottish psychiatrist and author. He studied science at Cambridge University before going to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and then to Vienna, Berlin and Zurich where he became a colleague of Carl Jung. After his Army Medical Service during the first World War, in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, he returned to England to become a psychiatrist. He was first a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff, and then of P. D. Ouspensky, before getting permission to start his own study groups in 1931. He is best known for his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a multi-volume collection of talks he gave to his study groups, but he also authored several other books and stories, including The Mark, The New Man and Living Time.
Quotes by Maurice Nicoll…
Life on earth is nothing but a field for working on oneself, so that one can return from whence one came.
Nothing is more useful or more interesting than to pull yourself up suddenly and notice where you are inside and where you are going. If you do this, you will begin to see what sort of psychology you have and what tendencies belong to it and what it keeps on connecting you with.
Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us.
There are two futures, one in time and one in scale, one horizontal — the other vertical and always there, just above our present state.
When you feel you are right you may be sure you are asleep.
Everything lies in relationship, in how you relate yourself to things. You cannot change the thing itself but you can change your relationship to it.
There are forces in you working upon you all the time to make you awaken, to heal you, to cure you — if you can only listen to them.
The opposites are thieves because what you build on one is undermined by the other. Or, to put it differently, joy leads to sorrow. But whatever is built in the centre cannot be taken from you.
It is useless to hear and not to experience, to be told and not to practice.
We know a lot about being in the wrong or right place externally, in space, but very little about being in the wrong or right place internally, in ourselves — and the latter is far more important.