Top 180 Carlos Castaneda Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.”

— Carlos Castaneda

152. “The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die.”

— Carlos Castaneda

153. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

154. “To seek the perfection of the warrior’s spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.”

— Carlos Castaneda

155. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

156. “A fine power is always heralded by great pain.”

— Carlos Castaneda

157. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

158. “For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.”

— Carlos Castaneda

159. “Our will operates in spite of our indulgence. For example, your will is already opening your gap, little by little.” “What gap are you talking about?” “There is a gap in us; like the soft spot on the head of a child which closes with age, this gap opens as one develops one’s will.”

— Carlos Castaneda

160. “What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.”

— Carlos Castaneda

161. “Sorcerers are convinced that all of us are a bunch of nincompoops. We can never relinquish our crummy control voluntarily, thus we have to be tricked.”

— Carlos Castaneda

162. “You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.”

— Carlos Castaneda

163. “Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he’s learning sorcery, but all he’s doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.”

— Carlos Castaneda

164. “Those fibers join a man to his surroundings;.”

— Carlos Castaneda

165. “If a warrior wants to pay back for all the favors he has received, and he has no one in particular to address his payment to, he can address it to the spirit of man, That’s always a very small account, and whatever one puts in it is more than enough.”

— Carlos Castaneda

166. “The journey by itself was sufficient; any hope of arriving at a permanent position was outside the boundaries of his knowledge.”

— Carlos Castaneda

167. “My benefactor used to say the seeds are the ‘sober head’ – the only part that could fortify the heart of man.”

— Carlos Castaneda

168. “The aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying.”

— Carlos Castaneda

169. “For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh,” he said, “because only when we look at things can we catch the funny edge of the world. On the other hand, when our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny.”

— Carlos Castaneda

170. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

171. “Man’s predicament is that he intuits his hidden resources, but he does not dare use them. This is why warriors say that man’s plight is the counterpoint between his stupidity and his ignorance. Man needs now, more than ever, to be taught new ideas that have to do exclusively with his inner world – shamans’ ideas, not social ideas, ideas pertaining to man facing the unknown, facing his personal death. Now, more than anything else, he needs to be taught the secrets of the assemblage point.”

— Carlos Castaneda

172. “My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.”

— Carlos Castaneda

173. “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, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”

— Carlos Castaneda

174. “My worrying, for instance, was a scene in which I looked at myself while I had the sensation of being boxed in. I call that worrying, It has happened to me a number of times after that first time.”

— Carlos Castaneda

175. “It isn’t that as time goes by you’re learning sorcery; rather, what you’re learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.”

— Carlos Castaneda

176. “All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.”

— Carlos Castaneda

177. “I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature.”

— Carlos Castaneda

178. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda

179. “The world doesn’t yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between.”

— Carlos Castaneda

180. “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.”

— Carlos Castaneda