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Here you will read the innermost thoughts and feelings of inspired seekers who have gone before you. Some names you may know… others you will be glad to meet!
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
If you did not desire your present position, you would not be doing everything possible to maintain it… If you cease doing those things which maintain your position, you will lose at once that position which you claim is forced upon you and which is your burden… It is impossible for any man to be placed against his own will in a condition which is contrary to his conscience.
The real problem we have with others is what we don’t yet understand about ourselves.
Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.
No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.
Dear to us are those who love us, but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life, they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
True fortitude I take to be quiet possession of a man’s self, and an undisturbed doing his duty, whatever evil besets or danger lies in his way.
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
It was the very essence of Gurdjieff’s teaching that the pupil must stand on his own feet and he took every measure, sometimes apparently harsh and brutal, to break down any tendency towards dependence upon himself. He would go to the length of depriving himself of much-needed helpers in his work rather than allow a relationship of dependence, or subordination. At the same time, he took for granted that a teacher is necessary and made it clear why this is so.
No man can work alone until he knows himself, and no one can know himself until he can be separate from his own egoism. The teacher is always needed to apply the knife, to sever the true from the false, but he can never work for his pupil, nor understand for him, nor be for him. We must work, and understand, and be, for ourselves.
Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work that he must do himself. Inner growth, a change of being, depends entirely upon the work which a man must do on himself.
Who you are in the moment is the seed of all moments to come.
We feel that we are greater than we know.
Be a lamp unto yourself.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought… Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods.
There is no one who hinders you from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which you are a part.
Natural man is said to be dead however good his actions may be from the civil and moral point of view.
But believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing, out beyond which you do not have to step in order to go very far!
Before God can deliver us from ourselves, we must undeceive ourselves.
You hurt people outside of you because you hurt inside of you.
From all this it may be concluded that an unregenerate man is like one who sees phantoms at night… and afterwards, when he is being regenerated, he is like the same man seeing in the early dawn that the things he saw at night are delusions.