George Gurdjieff Quotes

A man will give up almost anything except his suffering.

We know there's going to be nothing but pain, but we go back again and again.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.

Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering preferring a certain present to an uncertain future/

I admire people who destroy themselves.

People play with pain all the time.

I broke my back, I broke my ankle. I didn't cry then.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people.

Love's an excuse to get hurt and to hurt. Do you like to hurt? I do, I do then hurt me.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

I have nothing left to prove. I've already done enough to my neck.

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.