Pyotr Ouspensky Quotes
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Love is the eternally burning fire in which humanity & all the world are being purified.
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The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
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One cannot keep all old views and opinions and acquire new ones.
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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.
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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.
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It is by overcoming obstacles that man develops those qualities he needs.
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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.
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The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.
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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.
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There is no tyranny more ferocious than the tyranny of morality. Everything is sacrificed to it.
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In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity in the most diverse directions.
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In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.
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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.
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Ideas by themselves cannot produce change of being; your effort must go in the right direction, and one must correspond to the other.
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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.
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People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Everything we do consciously remains for us.
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It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
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I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him.
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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.
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Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.