viii. For a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.
xi. A warrior proceeds strategically.
If one wants to stop our fellow men, one must always be outside the circle that presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure.
xii. Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.
xiii. 'Stopping the world' was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow.
8. People hardly ever realize that we can cut anything from our lives, any time, just like that.
A man can get agreements from everything around him.
12. The fact that I know whether I am a Yaqui or not does not make it personal history. Only when someone else knows that does it become personal history. And I assure you that no one will ever know that for sure.
15. What's wrong with people knowing me? - What's wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won't be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance.
Lies are lies only if you have personal history.
17. We only have two alternatives: We either take everything for sure and real, or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.
19. He said that I had to curl my fingers gently as I walked so I would keep my attention on the trail and the surroundings.
His idea was that by forcing the hands into a specific position one was capable of greater stamina and greater awareness.
21. He pointed out that the course of my life I had not ever finished anything because of that sense of disproportionate importance that I attached to myself.
23. As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else.
34. The thing to do when you're impatient, is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.
Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch.
35. The sheer joy of just moving around without attaching any intellectual purpose to it.
39. He said that the only thing that counted was action, acting instead of talking.
When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them.
40. You feel that you are immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be canceled or regretted or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.
43. To assume the responsibility of one's decisions means that one is ready to die for them.
In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that we make in the face of our inevitable death.
53. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless chore. For instance, today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely; I did what I did knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion, suddenly and definitely. So, all in all, we and the snakes are on a par. One of them fed us today.
58. That I was not fighting my own battles but the battles of some unknown people. That I did not want to learn about plants or about hunting or about anything. And that his world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called 'my life'.
66. It makes no difference to hide if everyone knows that you are hiding. Your problems right now stem from that. When you are hiding, everyone knows that you are hiding, and when you are not, you are available for everyone to take a poke at you.
69. You lost her because you were accessible; you were always within her reach and your life was a routine one. The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible. In the case of that blond girl it would've meant that you had to become a hunter and meet her sparingly. Not the way you did. You stayed with her day after day, until the only feeling that remained was boredom.
To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love.
To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid exhausting yourself and others.
70. The hunter is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his world out of shape. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark.
79. A good hunter changes his ways as often as he needs.
He must know that there are powers on this earth that guide men and animals and everything that is living.
80. I am trying my best. - No. I disagree. You're not trying your best. You just said that because it sounds good to you; in fact, you've been saying the same thing about everything you do. You've been trying your best for years to no avail. Something must be done to remedy that.
For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.
81. If you don't think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for?
82. The change I'm taking about never takes place by degrees; it happens suddenly. And you are not preparing yourself for that sudden act that will bring a total change.
83. There are some people who are very careful about the nature of their acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they don't have time; therefore, their acts have a peculiar power.
Acts have power. Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his last battle.
84. Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man.
Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A hunter gives his last battle its due respect.
91. The difference between a hunter and a warrior is that a warrior is on his way to power, while a hunter knows nothing or very little about it.
98. Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world. A man hunting for power has almost no limits in his dreaming.
99. Every time you look at anything in your dreams it changes shape. The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then there is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping.
108. He said that if I really felt that my spirit was distorted I should simply fix it- purge it, make it perfect- because there was no other task in our entire lives which was more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit was to seek death, and that was the same as to seek nothing, since death was going to overtake us regardless of anything.
109. I had been roaming for such a long time that I had become callous to pain and sadness, except on certain occasions when I would realize my aloneness and my helplessness.
110. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior.
118. It makes no difference whatsoever whether it was a lion or my pants. Your feelings at that moment were what counted.
120. A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. But once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment.
168. A warrior is impeccable when he trusts his personal power regardless of whether it is small or enormous.
180. 'Not doing what I know how to do' is the key to power. In the case of looking at a tree, what I knew how to do was to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves or the spaces in between the leaves were never my concern. His last admonitions were to start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work my way to the whole tree, and not to let my eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power wast o allow the body to 'not-do'.
184. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
198. By reducing the world, I had enlarged it.
200. Instead of telling yourself the truth, that you are ugly and rotten and inadequate, you tell yourself that you are the complete opposite, knowing that you are lying and that you are absolutely beyond hope. It may hook you to another doing and then you may realize that both doings are lies, unreal, and that to hinge yourself to either one is a waste of time, because the only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the not-doing of the self.
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