Carlos Castañeda Quotes

«Путешествие было реальностью. Ты видел город. Я видел энергию. Ни ты, ни я не были правы. И ни ты, ни я не ошибались.»

You must let go of your desire to cling. The very same thing happened to me. I held on to things, such as the food I liked, the mountains where I lived, the people I used to enjoy talking to. But most of all I clung to the desire to be liked. Those things are our barriers to losing our human form. Our attention is trained to focus doggedly. That is the way we maintain the world. Now is the time to let go of all that. In order to lose your human form you should let go of all that ballast.

I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.

... that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds him and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior's humbleness. One is equal to everything.

..there was no need to injure the shrubs, since we had already injured the quail.

"- Ma seule raison, c'est de vouloir vraiment apprendre, juste pour savoir. Je vous assure, Don Juan, que mes intentions ne sont pas mauvaises.
- Je vous crois, je vous ai fumé.
- Je vous demande pardon ?
- C'est sans importance. Je connais vos motifs.
- Vous voulez dire que vous voyez à travers moi ?
- Si vous voulez.
- Alors vous m'apprendrez ?
- Non.
- Parce que je ne suis pas Indien ?
- Non. Parce que vous ne connaissez pas votre cœur. Ce qui est important, c'est que vous sachiez exactement pourquoi vous voulez entreprendre cette étude. Etudier le "Mescalito" ; c'est une chose très sérieuse. Si vous étiez Indien, le seul fait de souhaiter l'étudier suffirait. Car très peu d'Indiens expriment un tel désir."

"A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with
absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps."
I asked him why was it so and he said that when a man has fulfilled those four requisites
there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his acts lose the blundering quality of a fool’s acts. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.

A man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country...

For a warrior, to be inaccessible means that he touches the world around him sparingly. And above all, he deliberately avoids exhausting himself and others. He doesn't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves.

A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he’s clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.

I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature.

When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.

What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we’d get would be a true gift.

Nobody is born a warrior in exactly the same way that no one is born an average man

Power rests on the kind of knowledge that one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless? They will not prepare us for our unavoidable encounter with the unknown.