Top 224 Quotes & Sayings by Carlos Castaneda - Page 4

Seeing energy as it flows is an imperious need on the path of knowledge. Ultimately, all the effort of sorcerers is guided to that end. It is not enough for a warrior to know that the universe is energy; he has to verify it for himself.

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

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

Challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.

For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

I too did not want to take the path of a warrior. I believed that all that work was for nothing, and since we are all going to die what difference would it make to be a warrior? I was wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. Whenever you do realize that you are wrong, and that it certainly makes a world of difference, you can say that you are convinced. And then you can proceed by yourself. Any by yourself you may even become a man of knowledge

... the daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses

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.

All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.

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!

Your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. I, on the other hand, brought you freedom. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible. So, fear your captors, your masters. Don't waste your time and your power fearing me.

Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence.

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.

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting... Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like an ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under his control.

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

Heightened awareness is a mystery only for a reason.

A warrior, or any man for that matter, cannot possibly wish he were somewhere else; a warrior because he lives by challenge, an ordinary man because he doesn't know where his death is going to find him.

That's your doing. Now in order to affect that doing I am going to recommend that you learn another doing... It may hook you to another doing and then you may realize that both doings are lies, unreal, and that to hinge yourself to either one is a waste of time, because the only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the note-doing of the self

The shadows in the early morning don't tell much. The shadows rest at that time. So it's useless to gaze very early in the day. Around six in the morning the shadows wake up, and they are best around five in the afternoon. Then they are fully awake.

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

It is important to have a perspective then only through seeing the world is it possible to transcend ideas such as the Flyers, and other aberrant thought forms. With ruthlessness, cunning patience and sweetness, it can be cracked.

If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it-purge it, make it perfect-because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile...To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.

The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today.

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

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

My worrying, for instance, was a scene in which I looked at myself while I had the sensation of being boxed in. I call that worrying, It has happened to me a number of times after that first time.

Hunting power is a very strange affair. There is no way to plan it ahead of time. That's what's exciting about it. A warrior proceeds as if he had a plan though, because he trusts his personal power. He knows for a fact that it will make him act in th emost appropriate fashion.

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

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

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

If a warrior wants to pay back for all the favors he has received, and he has no one in particular to address his payment to, he can address it to the spirit of man, That's always a very small account, and whatever one puts in it is more than enough.

Things are only real after one has learned to agree on their realness. What took place this evening, for instance, cannot possibly be real to you, because no one could agree with you about it. 'Do you mean that you didn't see what happened?'. Of course I did. But I don't count. I am the one who's lying to you, remember?

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

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

And so you're afraid of the emptiness of your friend's life. But there's no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, I tell you. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal.

... when confronted with unusual life situations... A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value.

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

A warrior takes responsibility for his acts, for the most trivial of acts. An average man acts out his thoughts, and never takes responsibility for what he does.

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

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

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

There is no way to escape the doing of our world, so what a warrior does is to turn his world into his hunting ground. As a hunter, a warrior knows that the world is made to be used. So he uses every bit of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has no qualms in taking and using anything he wants, except that a warrior doesn't mind or he doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken himself

Before you embark on it you ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.