G. I. Gurdjieff: Man

All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)
Context: Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding.
Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: 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.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: 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.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: In speaking of evolution it is necessary to understand from the outset that no mechanical evolution is possible. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: 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.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: A man can keep silence in such a ways that no one will even notice it. The whole point is that we say a good deal too much. If we limited ourselves to what is actually necessary, this alone would be keeping the silence. And it is the same with everything else, with food, with pleasures, with sleep; with everything there is a limit to what is necessary. After this "sin" begins. This is something that must be grasped, a "sin" is something which is not necessary.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: In properly organized groups no faith is required; what is required is simply a little trust and even that only for a little while, for the sooner a man begins to verify all he hears the better it is for him. <!-- Ch. 11, p. 288

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

Aphorisms

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)