Top 180 Carlos Castaneda Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “For my teachers, unfortunately, certain things were, as they are for you, only tales of power.”

— Carlos Castaneda

102. “When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become.”

— Carlos Castaneda

103. “It is important to do what you don’t know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.”

— Carlos Castaneda

104. “You say you need help. Help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.”

— Carlos Castaneda

105. “As long as a man feels that he is the most important thing in the world he cannot really appreciate the world around him.”

— Carlos Castaneda

106. “Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable.”

— Carlos Castaneda

107. “A warrior takes responsibility for his acts, for the most trivial of acts. An average man acts out his thoughts, and never takes responsibility for what he does.”

— Carlos Castaneda

108. “Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless.”

— Carlos Castaneda

109. “The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.”

— Carlos Castaneda

110. “Leave Jesus on the cross. He’s very happy there!”

— Carlos Castaneda

111. “We don’t need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox!”

— Carlos Castaneda

112. “The average man is either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, he becomes a persecutor or a victim. These two conditions are prevalent as long as one does not see. Seeing dispels the illusion of victory, or defeat, or suffering.”

— Carlos Castaneda

113. “There is no beginning, the beginning is only in your thought.”

— Carlos Castaneda

114. “Beware of those who weep with realization, for they have realized nothing.”

— Carlos Castaneda

115. “Dwelling upon the self too much produces terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around.”

— Carlos Castaneda

116. “There is a flaw with words, they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment.”

— Carlos Castaneda

117. “Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge.”

— Carlos Castaneda

118. “This very rock where we’re sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give out attention to it.”

— Carlos Castaneda

119. “The art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.”

— Carlos Castaneda

120. “To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior’s spirit. It takes power to do that.”

— Carlos Castaneda

121. “Nobody is born a warrior in exactly the same way that no one is born an average man.”

— Carlos Castaneda

122. “Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.”

— Carlos Castaneda

123. “La lucha que cada uno libra contra su antiguo ser dura toda la vida.”

— Carlos Castaneda

124. “The shadows in the early morning don’t tell much. The shadows rest at that time. So it’s useless to gaze very early in the day. Around six in the morning the shadows wake up, and they are best around five in the afternoon. Then they are fully awake.”

— Carlos Castaneda

125. “For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.”

— Carlos Castaneda

126. “The secret is not in what you do to yourself but rather in what you don’t do.”

— Carlos Castaneda

127. “A guardian is broad-minded and understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic.”

— Carlos Castaneda

128. “Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence.”

— Carlos Castaneda

129. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

130. “One can say that the nagual accounts for creativity. The nagual is the only part of us that can create.”

— Carlos Castaneda

131. “For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here...”

— Carlos Castaneda

132. “To meet an ally a man must be a spotless warrior or the ally may turn against him and destroy him.”

— Carlos Castaneda

133. “Challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.”

— Carlos Castaneda

134. “If you were a warrior, you would know that the worst thing one can do is confront human beings directly.”

— Carlos Castaneda

135. “You take yourself too seriously, ” he said slowly. “You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything. You’re so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don’t go your way. I suppose you think that shows you have character. That’s nonsense! You’re weak, and conceited!” – Dom Juan.”

— Carlos Castaneda

136. “The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today.”

— Carlos Castaneda

137. “A man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country...”

— Carlos Castaneda

138. “Discipline Makes the Glowing Coat of Awareness Unpalatable to the Predator.”

— Carlos Castaneda

139. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

140. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

141. “We chose whether to be warriors or to be ordinary.”

— Carlos Castaneda

142. “The indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves. To.”

— Carlos Castaneda

143. “Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because it is the nature of his lot, for good or bad.”

— Carlos Castaneda

144. “If a warrior needs solace he simply chooses anyone and expresses to that person every detail of his turmoil. After all, the warrior is not seeking to be understood or helped; by talking he’s merely relieving himself of his pressure.”

— Carlos Castaneda

145. “When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.”

— Carlos Castaneda

146. “Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.”

— Carlos Castaneda

147. “Don Juan had always said to me that our great enemy is the fact that we never believe what is happening to us.”

— Carlos Castaneda

148. “The only difference between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can’t.”

— Carlos Castaneda

149. “How can I know who I am when I am all this?”

— Carlos Castaneda

150. “Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.”

— Carlos Castaneda