Gary Zukav Quotes

What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.

Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.

What you believe about who you are, where you came from, affects your whole worldview.

We all have a social mask, right? We put it on, we go out, put our best foot forward, our best image. But behind that social mask is a personal truth, what we really, really believe about who we are and what we're capable of.

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.

It sounds a little bit too arrogant, but I think I certainly have a working model for how I conduct my life, and it may or may not be a correct worldview.

Don't believe the hype; don't believe what it tells you on your driver's license. You are an extension of the power that created this whole universe.

You are what you believe you are.

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

I am what the universe made me to be, my dear.

I think of myself as a human being first and foremost, and secondly as a person whose profession is acting. If people want to make that into something more or less, that's up to them.

If I contemplate myself as part of the Universe: what am I?

What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.

I see knowledge of self. I know who I am. When I look in the mirror, I see me.

You have to see your unimportance before you can see your importance and your significance to the world.

You're never really playing yourself. You're always acting. It's an illusion that you're really playing yourself. The only time I'm playing myself is when I'm at home!

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn't quite know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their existence surging in the darkness of other creatures. We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness.

Please don't mistake who I am for who the character is.

There are three kinds of people I've found: those who think the universe is good, those who believe it's corrupt, and those who don't want to think about it any more than they can help. I prefer the first two.

Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.

Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they’re only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn’t it? Everything else is artful.

The narrative of our lives is a total construct. We get to choose what that is. That is something I've realized as I've gotten older. I have a lot of choices about the story that I'm telling myself about my life. So where do I find meaning?

How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.