Carlos Castaneda Quotes

... studying is a preparation for knowing; it is a patient and impatient exercise on the part of someone whose intent is not to know it all at once but to struggle to meet the timing of knowledge.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

My life is what a salmon must feel like. They are always going upstream, against the current.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

Anything worth changing is not easy to change.

He who wants to get to the source must swim against the current.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it's unlikely it would be worth the journey. Persist.

Give me something huge to fight, — and I should enjoy that — but why make me sweep the dust?

Every inch of progress is won in struggle.

If you're going to answer the call and you're going to transform and you're going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.

No one gets to their heaven without a fight...

Ain't nothing coming easily in this life. Sometimes you gotta work, you gotta grow and it gotta hurt.

Effort supposes resistance.

But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.

sometimes it's the fight that makes a thing worth having

The life you want is on the other side of the labor pains it takes to birth it.

The path of progress is seldom smooth. New things are often found hard to do. Our fathers found them so. We find them so. But are we not made better for the effort and scarifice?

Sometimes you face difficulties not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're doing something right.

To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.

She was a girl with a mountain to climb.

There's a place in me that can really relate to being the underdog. I'm always fighting to overcome the obstacle. I can really understand what's that about.

Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit.

Knowledge is a thing that one cannot have enough of. It is the fruit of wisdom, to be eaten carefully and digested fully, unlike that lunch you are bolting down, little friend.