Don Juan had always said to me that our great enemy is the fact that we never believe what is happening to us.
The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior,” he said. “It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior. “You are here, with me, because you want to be here. You should have assumed full responsibility by now, so the idea that you are at the mercy of the wind would be inadmissible.
I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature.
What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we’d get would be a true gift.
You must wait patiently, knowing that you’re waiting, and knowing what you’re waiting for. That is the warrior’s way. And if it is a matter of fulfilling your promise then you must be aware that you are fulfilling it. Then a time will come when your waiting will be over and you will no longer have to honor your promise.
Discipline Makes the Glowing Coat of Awareness Unpalatable to the Predator.
A fine power is always heralded by great pain.
Remember what I’ve told you,” he said. “Don’t count on emotional realizations. Let your assemblage point move first, then years later have the realization.
Those fibers join a man to his surroundings;.
Everything is filled to the brim,” he repeated, “and everything is equal. I’m not like your friend who just grew old. When I tell you that nothing matters I don’t mean it the way he does. For him, his struggle was not worth his while, because he was defeated; for me there is no victory, or defeat, or emptiness. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal and my struggle was worth my while.
There is no beginning, the beginning is only in your thought.
To meet an ally a man must be a spotless warrior or the ally may turn against him and destroy him.
La lucha que cada uno libra contra su antiguo ser dura toda la vida.
A man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country...
The only difference between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can’t.
The journey by itself was sufficient; any hope of arriving at a permanent position was outside the boundaries of his knowledge.
But we must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn’t know it. That’s a sorcerer’s controlled folly.
Self-pity is the real enemy and the source of man’s misery. Without a degree of pity for himself, man could not afford to be as self-important as he is. However, once the force of self-importance is engaged, it develops its own momentum. And it is this seemingly independent nature of self-importance which gives it its fake sense of worth.
Perhaps it’s not possible to explain,” he said. “Certain things in your life matter to you because they’re important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for me, not a single thin is important any longer neither my acts nor the acts of any of my fellow men. I go on living though. because I have my will. Because I have tempered my will throughout my life until it’s neat and wholesome and now it doesn’t matter to me that nothing matters. My will controls the folly of my life.
The world doesn’t yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between.
In the life of a warrior there is only one thing, one issue alone which is really undecided: how far one can go on the path of knowledge and power. That is an issue which is open and no one can predict its outcome. I once told you that the freedom a warrior has is either to act impeccably or to act like a nincompoop. Impeccability is indeed the only act which is free and thus the true measure of a warrior’s spirit.