Carlos Castaneda Quotes

Discipline, as understood by a warrior, is creative, open, and produces freedom. It is the ability to face the unknown, transforming the feeling of knowing into reverent astonishment; of considering things that exceed the scope of our habits, and daring to face the only war that is worthwhile: The battle for awareness.

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.

Never take a path that has no heart in it. You can't lose if your heart is in your work, but you can't win if your heart is not in it.

You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.

The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.

We don't need more to be thankful for, we just need to be more thankful.

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos, "... most of our energy goes into upholding our importance... if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe."

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

"Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one relieve one's sadness," don Juan said. "Warriors are always joyful because their love is unalterable and their beloved, the earth, embraces them and bestows upon them inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings." Don Juan again caressed the ground with tenderness. "This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom."

The ego is like a tired old dog. We can never kill it, so put it out on the back porch, let it rest there, and step around it.

Things don't change, only the way you look at them.

It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.

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

Self importance is man's greatest enemy.

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamens call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped it... Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you're too real. Your endeavors are too real, your moods are too real. Don't take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.

We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.

As long as a man feels that he is the most important thing in the world he cannot really appreciate the world around him.