P.D. Ouspensky Quotes
It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him. So long as a man is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself.
Love is the eternally burning fire in which humanity & all the world are being purified.
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
There is no tyranny more ferocious than the tyranny of morality. Everything is sacrificed to it.
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.
A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.
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.
There is something in us that keeps us where we find ourselves. I think this is the most awful thing of all.
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
Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.
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.
To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself - I am. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness.
There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.
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
a man can be given only what he can use; and he can use only that for which he has sacrificed something
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.
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.
If you want to remember yourself, the best thing is not to think about yourself. As long as you think about yourself, you will not remember yourself.
We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.
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.
Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams.
A symbol may serve to transfer our intuitions and to suggest new ones only so long as its meaning is not defined.
If one does not develop, one goes down. In life, in ordinary conditions everything goes down, or one capacity may develop at the expense of another.
Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emo
Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.