Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

Greek-Armenian-Georgian Writer, Philosopher, Mystic and Spiritual Teacher

"Love of consciousness evokes the same in response. Love of feeling evokes the opposite. Love of body depends only on type and polarity."

"Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing."

"Man is given a limited quantity of experiences; being economical with them lengthens his life."

"Man is a symbol of the laws of creation; in him there is evolution, involution, struggle, progress and retrogression, struggle between positive and negative, active and passive, yes and no, good and evil."

"Man lies to himself a lot."

"Man is refreshed not by the quantity but by the quality of sleep—sleep little without regret."

"Man has no individual “I”. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his “I” is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion."

"Love without knowledge is demonic."

"Man must use what he has, not hope for what is not."

"Meat is necessary when there is hard physical work to be done, or in a very cold climate, or when edible plants cannot be found...Animal flesh provides all the substances we need, both for the intensive working of our organism and for maintaining a normal temperature in cold climates."

"Man such as we know him, the "man-machine," the man who cannot "do," and with whom and through whom everything "happens," cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago."

"Morality is a stick with two ends; it can be turned this way and that."

"Men have their minds and women their feelings more highly developed. Either alone can give nothing. Think what you feel and feel what you think. Fusion of the two produces another force."

"No energy is ever lost in the cosmic scheme."

"Objective knowledge, the idea of unity included, belongs to objective consciousness. The forms which express this knowledge when perceived by subjective consciousness are inevitably distorted and, instead of truth, they create more and more delusions. With objective consciousness it is possible to see and feel the unity of everything. But for subjective consciousness the world is split up into millions of separate and unconnected phenomena. Attempts to connect these phenomena into some sort of system in a scientific or philosophical way lead to nothing because man cannot reconstruct the idea of the whole starting from separate facts and they cannot divine the principles of the division of the whole without knowing the laws upon which this division is based."

"One of man’s important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the "man-machine," the man who cannot "do," and with whom and through whom everything "happens," cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago."

"Mr. Self-love and Madame Vanity are the two chief agents of the devil."

"Now everything that you do is written in red or black in Angel Gabriel's book. Not for everyone is this record kept, but only for those who have taken a position of responsibility. There is a Law of Sins, and if you do not fulfill all your obligations, you will pay."

"One of the strongest motives for the wish to work on yourself is the realization that you may die at any moment—only you must first realize this."

"One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind."

"One twentieth of all our energy goes to emotional and instinctive centers. Self-remembering is a lamp which must be kept alight by energy from these two centers. Our thinking center is not really a center, but an apparatus for collecting impressions."

"Only conscious suffering is of value."

"Only he can be impartial who is able to put himself into the position of others."

"Only help him who is not an idler."

"Only super-efforts count."

"Only he who can take care of the property of others can have his own."

"Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity."

"Remember yourself always and everywhere."

"Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively."

"Respect all religions."

"Remember that here work is not done for work’s sake, but as a means."

"Respect every religion."

"Rest comes not from the quantity but from the quality of sleep."

"Sleep is very comfortable, but waking is very bitter."

"Sincerity is the key which will open the door through which you will see your separate parts, and you will see something quite new. You must go on trying to be sincere. Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little."

"Sincerity is the key to self-knowledge and to be sincere with oneself brings great suffering."

"The advantage of the separate individual is that he is very small and that, in the economy of Nature, it makes no difference whether there is one mechanical man more or less. We can easily understand this correlation of magnitudes if we imagine the correlation between a microscopic cell and our own body. The presence or absence of one cell will change nothing in the life of the body. We cannot be conscious of it, and it can have no influence on the life and functions of the organism. In exactly the same way a separate individual is too small to influence the life of the cosmic organism to which he stands in the same relation (with regard to size) as a cell stands to our own organism. And this is precisely what makes his 'evolution' possible; on this are based his 'possibilities'."

"The being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a mineral and of an animal. This is exactly what people do not understand. And they do not understand that knowledge depends on being. Not only do they not understand this latter but they definitely do not wish to understand it."

"Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek."

"The chief means of happiness in this life is the ability to consider outwardly always, inwardly never."

"The only type of sexual relations possible are those with someone who is as advanced and capable as oneself."

"The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, always provided you remember the work."

"The power of changing oneself lies not in the mind, but in the body and the feelings. Unfortunately, however, our body and our feelings are so constituted that they don’t care a jot about anything so long as they are happy. They live for the moment and their memory is short. The mind alone lives for tomorrow. Each has its own merits. The merit of the mind is that it looks ahead. But it is only the other two that can "do.""

"The highest that a man can attain is to be able to do."

"The energy expended in active inner work is immediately transformed into new energy; that expended in passive work is lost forever."

"The greatest untold story is the evolution of God."

"There are two kinds of doing—automatic and doing what you ‘wish.’ Take a small thing which you ‘wish’ to do and cannot do and make this your God. Let nothing interfere. If you ‘wish,’ you can. Without wishing you never ‘can.’ ‘Wish’ is the most powerful thing in the world."

"There do exist enquiring minds, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him. For without this knowledge, he will have no focal point in his search. Socrates’ words, “Know thyself” remain for all those who seek true knowledge and being."

"There is a cosmic law which says that every satisfaction must be paid for with a dissatisfaction."

"The worse the conditions of life, the greater the possibility for productive work, provided you work consciously."