Carlos Castaneda Quotes
Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.
A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.
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.
We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.
In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamens call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.
As long as a man feels that he is the most important thing in the world he cannot really appreciate the world around him.
The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.
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.
If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.
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?
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.
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
Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.
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.
Only a warrior can survive the path of knowledge because the art of the warrior is to balance the pain of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
A warrior knows that he is only a man. His only regret is that his life is so short that he can't grab onto all the things he would like to. But for him, this is not an issue; it's only a pity.
Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
A warrior doesn't know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self.
There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn't do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself.
Men have to be hooked. Women don't need that. Women go freely into anything. That's their power and at the same time their drawback. Men have to be led and women have to be contained
Will is what can make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're defeated.
Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever must be learned must be learned the hard way.
The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.
Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow, you must not stay with it under any circumstances.
An average man is too concerned with liking people or with being liked himself. A warrior likes, that's all. He likes whatever or whomever he wants, for the hell of it.
The only thing we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.
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
A guardian is broad-minded and understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic.
I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.
You say you need help. Help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.
When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.
Dwelling upon the self too much produces terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around.
To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.
