P.D. Ouspensky Quotes
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In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity in the most diverse directions.
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Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams.
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You can understand other people only as much as you understand yourself and only on the level of your own being. This means you can judge other people's knowledge but you cannot judge their being. You can see in them only as much as you have in yourself. But people always make the mistake of thinking they can judge other people's being. In reality, if they wish to meet and understand people of a higher development than themselves they must work with the aim of changing their being.
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Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.
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Begin with the possible: begin with one step. There is always a limit you cannot do more than you can do. If you try to do too much you will do nothing
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If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no 'friction,' no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.
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There is something in us that keeps us where we find ourselves. I think this is the most awful thing of all.
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We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.
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Besides, all evil is relative. Something that is evil at one level of evolution can be good at an earlier stage because it provides the essential stimulus for development. But you want to judge everything by your own standards. You have reached a comparatively high level and so you see what you fight against as evil. Just think of the others, those who are at an earlier stage of development. Do not bar them from the path toward progress and evolution.
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Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology-for that applies only to a developed man-but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.
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Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.
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Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.
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It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
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The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.
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In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.
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A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.
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Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.
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I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another
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One cannot keep all old views and opinions and acquire new ones.
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The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.
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Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation says "I." And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole.
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Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.
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I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The 'miraculous' was a penetration into this unknown reality.
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Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.
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Many things are mechanical and should remain mechanical. But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings—that is what has to be studied and can and should be changed. Mechanical thinking is not worth a penny. You can think about many things mechanically, but you will get nothing from it.
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People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.
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Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.
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Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art.
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Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
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Truths that become old become decrepit and unreliable; sometimes they may be kept going artificially for a certain time, but there is no life in them.
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