“Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.”
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.
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G. I. Gurdjieff62
influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, compos… 1866–1949Related quotes
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