Petr Uspensky Quotes

How terrible it is that quite without understanding or intention, when we are still too young to realize what the result may be, we can do things that affect our whole life and change our whole future.

We cannot know the truth but we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things: about God, about the future life, about the universe, about the origin of man, about evolution, about everything; but in reality they do not know anything, even about themselves. And every time they speak about something they do not know as though they knew it, they lie.

Thought does not grasp, does not convey, what is at times clearly felt. Thought is too slow, too short. There are no words and no forms to convey what one sees and knows in such moments. And it is impossible to fix these moments, to arrest them, to make them longer, more obedient for the will. There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as dreams disappear. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.

it was imperative to make a distinction between the system and G.

Did I dream all that and what did it mean?” he says to himself. “And what I see now, is this too a dream?

"and in the other, a sceptre in the form of an Egyptian cross — the sign of his power over birth. "I am The Great Law," the Emperor said. "I am the name of God. The four letters of his name are in me and I am in all.

"A man easily admits his incompetency in music, dancing, or higher mathematics, but he always maintains the privilege of having an opinion and being a judge of questions relating to "first principles.

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 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.

said to myself then that the war must be looked upon as one of those generally catastrophic conditions of life in the midst of which we have to live and work, and seek answers to our questions and doubts. The war, the great European war, in the possibility of which I had not wanted to believe and the reality of which I did not for a long time wish to acknowledge, had become a fact.

At this moment I want you to understand one thing: it is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The whole thing, all work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence. And for this it is necessary to know beforehand which influence is the more profitable.

I was beginning to get very interested in my groups. I saw a possibility of continuing the work.