Carlos Castaneda Quotes

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

It's not important to me that people understand me.

I don't really care any longer what other people think.

Anywhere everywhere! Anything anyhow! just dance!

Being twenty-something is all about taking it in: eating it, drinking it, and spitting out the seeds later. It's about being fearless, and stupid, and dangerous, and unfocused, and abandoned. It's about being in it, not on top of it

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

You should make no effort to try to join society, stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to come to you.

You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)

Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

A warrior seeks to act rather than talk.

Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge.

A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.

I am free. If I want to be sad, it is my freedom. If I want to be happy, it is my freedom. Once you know that you are your world, you have penetrated into a different kind of understanding. Then nothing else matters - all else is games and excuses.

Enjoy everything. Need nothing. Needing someone is the fastest way to kill a relationship .. The greatest gift you can give someone is the strength and the power not to need you, to need you for nothing.

The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

People always think that loyalty is laudable. People are always saying that we must remain faithful to tradition, to family, to our class, to our ideas. Of course not! That would be equivalent to zero brain activity. If you really want to think, to seek truth, to advance intellectually, you must turn your back on clichés, on preconceived ideas - even those belonging to your spiritual family. For an intellectual, his true duty is not to fidelity, but to infidelity.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it

In the end you have only you.

The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.

You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.

She was feeling her bohemian oats.