George Gurdjieff Quotes

Sunday “Well then, as I have just told you, they devoted each day of the week to productions in one or another special branch of knowledge — either works of their hands, or some other form of consciously designed being-manifestation “Thus, Monday was devoted to the first group, and this day was called the ‘day of religious and civil ceremonies’, “Tuesday was allotted to the second group, and was called the ‘day of architecture’, “Wednesday was called the ‘day of painting’, “Thursday, the ‘day of religious and popular dances’, “Friday, the ‘day of sculpture’, “Saturday, the ‘day of the mysteries’ or, as it was also called, the ‘day of the theater’, “Sunday, the ‘day of music and song

It is necessary to observe yourself differently than you do in ordinary life. It is necessary to have a different attitude, not the attitude you had till now. You know where your habitual attitudes have led you till now. There is no sense in going on as before.

"Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "i". And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion."

how there are never crystallized in them any subjective being-convictions formed by their own logical deliberations — as in general is proper to three-brained beings — but instead, only those convictions are crystallized that depend exclusively upon the opinions of others.

Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

In this connection, it is interesting to remark that I, as well as many others, noticed that when he himself used these sayings in conversation, it always seemed to every hearer that they could not have been more apt or better put, but that if anyone else made use of them, they seemed to be entirely beside the point or improbable nonsense.

What you call the subconscious, is in my opinion the real human consciousness.

There is a definite time, a definite term, for everything. Possibilities for everything exist only for a definite time.

Gurdjieff

"Every man comes into the world like a clean sheet of paper, and then the people and circumstances around him begin vying with each other to dirty this sheet and cover it with writing... Gradually the sheet is dirtied, and the dirtier with so-called "knowledge" the sheet becomes, the cleverer the man is considered to be... And the dirty sheet itself, seeing that people consider its "dirt" as merit, considers it valuable."

If you are working inwardly, Nature will help you. For the man who is working, Nature is sister of charity; she brings him what he needs for his work. If you need money for your work, even if you do nothing to get it, the money will come to you from all sides.

The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine all the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship. Consider what the cultured humanity of our times spends money on; even leaving the war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that humanity, as it is now, with the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has.

Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively.

And he added in a half-sarcastic tone: ‘Soon we shall be absolutely isolated from everything existing and functioning in the whole of the Universe; but, on the other hand, owing firstly to my new invention, and secondly to the knowledge we have already attained for ourselves, we have not only now the possibility of returning to the said world, to become again a particle of all that exists, but also we shall soon be worthy to become nonparticipating eyewitnesses of certain of these World-laws, which for ordinary uninitiated three-centered beings are what they call “great-inscrutable-mysteries-of-Nature” but which in reality are only natural and very simple results “automatically-flowing-one-from-the-other.

Only he will deserve the name of “man” and can count upon anything prepared for them from above, who has already acquired corresponding data for being able to preserve intact both the wolf and the sheep entrusted to his care.

Meat is necessary when there is hard physical work to be done, or in a very cold climate, or when edible plants cannot be found...Animal flesh provides all the substances we need, both for the intensive working of our organism and for maintaining a normal temperature in cold climates.