These sayings come from the following pupils of Gurdjieff’s pupils:

  • Alfred Orage
  • Peter Ouspensky
  • Maurice Nicoll
  • Jane Heap
  • Jeanne de Salzmann.

Be a pianist, not a piano.

Beings differ in the potentiality of their awareness.

Consider the ‘sly’ man; he tries to be aware always.

Controlled imagination becomes mental work.

Every time we repress the working of a center, we become a two- or one-brained being.

Honest doubt is suspended judgment.
‘I’ is the Messiah, for whom the creature is waiting.

It is impossible to arrive at a judgment of ourselves through introspection – this judgment is socially conditioned.

Jealousy is the dragon in paradise; the hell of heaven; and the most bitter of the emotions because associated with the sweetest.

John The Baptist: Objective Conscience crying in the wilderness of the body.

Man believes he has will; this is his illusion.
Nature is the objective creditor of every living being.

No statement can be understood without the effort of conscious assimilation.This brings realization.

Normal man collects impressions and excretes behavior.

One third of one’s time should be spent in pondering.

Pondering implies the use of both mind and emotions.

Prayer is wish in three centers, plus effort in three centers.

Realization: when that which is known is also felt and sensed.

Religiousness is an emotional attitude to the question: “Why was I born?”

Superstition is an emotional attitude towards a lie.

The last degree of esoteric teaching is plain common sense.

The real man is he who can, at will, in any circumstance, play the reasonable part.

There is a complete protection available to you: silence.

To destroy a delusion may be very unpleasant, but to hold it frantically in one’s grasp is true abnormality.

A man can be given only what he can use; and he can use only that for which he has sacrificed something.

Catch a moment when you are particularly far from remembering yourself—at this moment you will remember yourself.

If we believe that we do not identify with something, we are identified with the idea that we are not identified.

It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.

The first step in acquiring consciousness is the realization that we are not conscious.

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.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half awake.

When you become identified you cannot observe

Beyond our life we meet – our life. We cannot turn in any other direction!

I will also tell you a secret. We have to will one another: this is the beginning of conscious love.

Identifying is the enemy of Self-Remembering.

Man must REALIZE his mechanicalness before he can change…

Negative emotions keeps us where we are. If you are negative it is always your fault.

No effort = no work : no work = no awakening : no awakening = death.

Often people who have listened to the teaching even for years do not understand what it means to work on themselves.

Only through a flash of truth can one understand ignorance.

Our greatest danger is to crystallize out in our idea of ourselves.

Our mental habits are to us not habits, but truths. They seem right. We cannot see them as habits. This is the tragedy.
Realization of mechanicalness is one form of Self-Remembering.

The only person you have to work on is yourself.

The personal work of self-observation is for all one’s life.

The secret lies in taking Life as an exercise.
The senses cleansed see all as ‘infinite and holy’.

To become conscious of something unattractive in yourself gives a sense of freedom.

To see I’s in yourself, notice where you criticize others.

To talk about one’s difficulties is a sign that one has not understood much.

We project onto others what we cannot see in ourselves.

When the observing I is established in us, it is from this I that everything else follows.

When we begin to observe ourselves sincerely our whole fate begins to change.

Which of you have observed yet that you are working more for greater comfort than for consciousness.

Work is a question of increasing one’s consciousness, not imitating virtues like monkeys.

Growth of understanding becomes hunger for being.

Love your enemies – they may tell you the truth.

Roll your triangle.

The essence is in the emotions, but not of them. The “I” is in the essence but not of it.

To make a relationship with someone is to make a relationship with yourself.

We never refuse in The Work

Never complain, never explain.

Wish is organic. Wish is a movement towards something.

You are responsible for what you have understood

Everything comes from the wish, the will.

I need to have a force in me coming from a higher level of the cosmos. It must become part of what I am.

I need to know myself as a whole and to express myself as a whole, that is, to be a whole.

If all my sensations, feelings, and thoughts were in alignment, I would be a conscious being.

In order for my being to change, I must understand my state emotionally.

Make a demand on yourself. If you do not succeed in making a connection, deprive the body of something it likes.

No movement from the periphery toward the center will ever reach the center.

Only one thing counts: ‘I exist.’

Our work is to understand better the collected state, a state in which I engage in a new order.

There are no miracles. It is all a play of forces.

My being is what I am.

The Fourth Way is a way of understanding that requires the awakening of another intelligence.

The first conscious shock—to awake to oneself—is for coming to a more collected state that allows us to open to our being.

It is necessary to die to oneself in order to be born again—that is, to die to one level of being in order to rise to another.