Carlos Castaneda Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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

Carlos Castaneda
A hunter that is worth his salt does not catch game because he sets his traps, or because he knows the hunting routines of his prey, but because he himself has no routines. This is his advantage. He is not at all like the animals he is after, fixed by heavy routines and predictable quirks; he is free, fluid, unpredictable

Carlos Castaneda
This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it

Carlos Castaneda
The fact of the matter is that many children see.... Most of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to correct them.

Carlos Castaneda
To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control

Carlos Castaneda
When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.

Carlos Castaneda
Everything in the world is a force, a pull or a push. In order for us to be pushed or pulled we need to be like a sail, like a kite in the wind. But if we have a hole in the middle of our luminosity, the force goes through it and never acts upon us.

Carlos Castaneda
There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity?

Carlos Castaneda
The body must be perfection before the will is a functioning unit

Carlos Castaneda
Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so...because we learn what to perceive.

Carlos Castaneda
Let's say that when every one of us is born we bring with us a little ring of power. That little ring is almost immediately put to use. So every one of us is already hooked from birth and our rings of power are joined to everyone else's. In other words, our rings of power are hooked to the doing of the world in order to make the world.

Carlos Castaneda
A warrior, on the other hand, is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. But once his calculations are over he acts. He lets go. That's abandon.

Carlos Castaneda
It was stupidity that forced us to discard anything that did not conform with ourself - reflective expectations.

Carlos Castaneda
To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to.

Carlos Castaneda
There is no way to escape the doing of our world, so what a warrior does is to turn his world into his hunting ground. As a hunter, a warrior knows that the world is made to be used. So he uses every bit of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has no qualms in taking and using anything he wants, except that a warrior doesn't mind or he doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken himself

Carlos Castaneda
What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda
Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Carlos Castaneda
I'm afraid you will have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain.

Carlos Castaneda
The spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only warriors are consistently attuned to such revelations.

Carlos Castaneda
Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.

Carlos Castaneda
The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be.

Carlos Castaneda
The twilight is the crack between the worlds. It is the door to the unknown.

Carlos Castaneda
You say you need help. Help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.

Carlos Castaneda
Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over walls; they don't demolish them.

Carlos Castaneda
The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such and so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue

Carlos Castaneda
The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.

Carlos Castaneda
Before you embark on it you ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.

Carlos Castaneda
For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

Carlos Castaneda
A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.

Carlos Castaneda
Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do

Carlos Castaneda