For a warrior, to be inaccessible means that he touches the world around him sparingly. And above all, he deliberately avoids exhausting himselfand others. He doesn't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves.

And so you're afraid of the emptiness of your friend's life. But there's no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, I tell you. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal.

It takes all the time and all the energy we have to conquer the idiocy in us

An average man is too concerned with liking people or with being liked himself. A warrior likes, that's all. He likes whatever or whomever he wants, for the hell of it.

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

The path to knowledge is a forced one. In order to learn, we must be pushed. On the path of knowledge we are always fighting something, avoiding something, preparing for something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater and more powerful than us.

Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable I had to work in the most intense fashion, and that it was absurd. I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong. "The trick is in what one emphasizes," he said. "We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."