“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. Gurdjieff 62
influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, compos… 1866–1949Related quotes
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Statement of 1971; as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 145
1959 - 1973, Various sources
“To name the man is to say all!”
Dixi omnia cum hominem nominavi.
Letter 22, 4.
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“Where a man calls himself by a name which is not his name, he is telling a falsehood.”
Reddaway v. Banham (1895), L. R. 2 Q. B. D. [1895], p. 293.
De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)
