P. D. Ouspensky
Russian esotericist, philosopher, and chief literary heir of G. I. Gurdjieff — the man whose 1949 In Search of the Miraculous became the canonical written record of Gurdjieff's oral teaching of the Fourth Way, and whose own books Tertium Organum (1912), A New Model of the Universe (1931), and The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950) developed an independent line of esoteric philosophy alongside the Work. Born 1878 in Moscow, Ouspensky encountered Gurdjieff in 1915, worked closely with him until their split in 1924, then taught his own groups in London for the rest of his life. He died in 1947, two years before In Search of the Miraculous was published. Through that book — and through his pupils, who include Maurice Nicoll, Rodney Collin, and Lord Pentland — Ouspensky became one of the principal channels through which Fourth Way teaching reached the English-speaking world.
quotes in library
Quotes by P. D. Ouspensky
115 quotes“You cease to remember yourself.”
“You become a part of the thing you are identified with.”
“In ordinary life, man is identified with everything: thoughts, emotions, sensations, desires, antipathies.”
“There is nothing he is not identified with.”
“Therefore he has no real self.”
“To recover the self, identification must be observed and gradually weakened.”
“This is one of the central practices of the Work.”
“Negative emotions are the principal source of the loss of energy.”
“They consume an enormous amount of force without giving anything in return.”
“To free oneself from negative emotions is one of the great aims of the Work.”
“Not by suppression. By understanding.”
“By seeing them clearly, their grip loosens.”
“Conscience is the higher feeling of moral truth.”
“It is buried beneath conventional morality and social training.”
“To uncover it is part of the Work.”
“When conscience awakens, you cannot ignore it.”
“It points to a different way of being than ordinary morality.”
“It is the inner moral law of the awakened person.”
“There can be no real understanding without effort.”
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