Top 50 P.D. Ouspensky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

2. “Seek the path, do not seek attainment, seek for the path within yourself. Do not expect to hear the truth from others, nor to see it, nor to read it in books. Look for the truth within yourself, not without yourself.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

3. “The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

4. “Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

5. “The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

6. “When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

7. “Divide in yourself the mechanical from the conscious, see how little there is of the conscious, how seldom it works, and how strong is the mechanical – mechanical attitudes, mechanical intentions, mechanical thoughts, mechanical desires.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

8. “Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

9. “Most people can accept the truth only in the form of a lie.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

10. “Effort plus motive equals result.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

11. “Art is the communication of ecstasy.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

12. “One cannot keep all the old views and opinions and acquire new ones.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

13. “The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

14. “I’ve found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

15. “Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation says “I.” And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

16. “Man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

17. “People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

18. “To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself – I am. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

19. “I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

20. “If you want to remember yourself, the best thing is not to think about yourself. As long as you think about yourself, you will not remember yourself.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

21. “Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

22. “A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

23. “Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

24. “Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

25. “There is no tyranny more ferocious than the tyranny of morality. Everything is sacrificed to it.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

26. “Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

27. “We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

28. “It is by overcoming obstacles that man develops those qualities he needs.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

29. “Did I dream all that and what did it mean?” he says to himself. “And what I see now, is this too a dream?”

— P.D. Ouspensky

30. “When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him. So long as a man is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

31. “I felt that on a basis of a “search for the miraculous” it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

32. “The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

33. “Two things can get people to make efforts: if people want to get something, or if they want to get rid of something. Only, in ordinary conditions, without knowledge, people do not know what they can get rid of or what they can gain.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

34. “Many things are mechanical and should remain mechanical. But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings – that is what has to be studied and can and should be changed. Mechanical thinking is not worth a penny. You can think about many things mechanically, but you will get nothing from it.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

35. “Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

36. “Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

37. “A symbol may serve to transfer our intuitions and to suggest new ones only so long as its meaning is not defined.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

38. “There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

39. “There is something in us that keeps us where we find ourselves. I think this is the most awful thing of all.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

40. “Truths that become old become decrepit and unreliable; sometimes they may be kept going artificially for a certain time, but there is no life in them.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

41. “The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

42. “Our thought has acquired many bad habits, and one of them is thinking without purpose. Our thinking has become automatic; we are quite satisfied if we think of and develop possible side-issues without having any idea why we are doing it. From the point of view of this system such thinking is useless. All study, all thinking and investigation must have one aim, one purpose in view, and this aim must be attaining consciousness.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

43. “Learn to see it in thyself and thou wilt understand the infinite essence, hidden in all illusory forms. Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hierolgyphics of deeper ideas.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

44. “A man may not know what will happen as a result of other people’s actions or as the result of unknown causes, but he always knows all possible results of his own actions.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

45. “And I tell you that people comparatively rarely tell a deliberate lie. In most cases they think they speak the truth. And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. They lie all the time, both to themselves and to others. Therefore nobody ever understands either himself or anyone else.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

46. “We do not comprehend all these matters quite clearly, but in general it is plain that we think in space and time by perceptions TERTIUM ORGANUM ′ only; but by concepts we think independently of space and time.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

47. “Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today. Quite the reverse, if a man did nothing yesterday, no demands are made upon him today; if he did anything yesterday, it means that he must do more today. This certainly does not mean that it is better to do nothing. Whoever does nothing receives nothing.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

48. “I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

49. “Whatever work a man may be doing, it is enough for him to try to do each action deliberately, with his mind, following every movement, and he will see that the quality of his work will change immediately.”

— P.D. Ouspensky

50. “Q. Why is it so difficult to control attention? A. Lack of habit. We are too accustomed to letting things happen. When we want to control attention or something else, we find it difficult, just as physical work is difficult if we are not accustomed to it.”

— P.D. Ouspensky