Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever must be learned must be learned the hard way.

What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die - an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconcievable universe with our minds.

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.

We don't need more to be thankful for, we just need to be more thankful.

A warrior thinks of death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit.

A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.

In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos, "... most of our energy goes into upholding our importance... if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe."