The Fourth Way Principal Ideas of The Fourth Way Teaching
of G.I. Gurdjieff

"It may surprise you if I say that the chief feature of a modern man's being which explains everything else that is lacking in him is sleep."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 66

"Man has no permanent and unchangeable I....Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking 'I.' And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 59

"We live ordinarily with only a very minute part of our functions and our strength, because we do not recognize that we are machines, and we do not know the nature and working of our mechanism."
Views from the Real World, pg 75

"All the activity of the human machine is divided into four sharply defined groups, each of which is controlled by its own special mind or 'center'...the thinking, the emotional, the moving, and the instinctive."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 106

"It must be understood that man consists of two parts: essence and personality. Essence in man is what is his own. Personality in man is what is 'not his own.' 'Not his own' means what has come from outside, what he has learned, or reflects, all traces of exterior impressions left on the memory and in the sensations, all words and movements that have been learned, all feelings created by imitation—all this is 'not his own,' all this is personality."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 161

"Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave, and the plaything of the forces acting upon him."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 104

"Fusion, inner unity, is obtained by means of 'friction,' by the struggle between 'yes' and 'no' in man. If a man lives without inner struggle, if everything happens in him without opposition, if he goes wherever he is drawn or wherever the wind blows, he will remain such as he is. But if a struggle begins in him, and particularly if there is a definite line in this struggle, then, gradually, permanent traits begin to form themselves, he begins to 'crystallize.'"
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 32

"Self-study is the work or the way which leads to self-knowledge....The chief method of self-study is self-observation. Without properly applied self-observation a man will never understand the connection and the correlation between the various functions of his machine, will never understand how and why on each separate occasion everything in him 'happens.'"
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 105

"The third state of consciousness is self-remembering or self-consciousness or consciousness of one's being. It is usual to consider that we have this state of consciousness or that we can have it if we want it. Our science and philosophy have overlooked the fact that we do not possess this state of consciousness and that we cannot create it in ourselves by desire or decision alone."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 141

"Therefore a man who wants to awake must look for other people who also want to awake and work together with them....The work must be organized and it must have a leader...a man who has in his time passed through such organized work himself."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 222

"The first fundamental law of the universe is the law of three forces, or three principles, or, as it is often called, the law of three. According to this law every action, every phenomenon in all worlds without exception, is the result of a simultaneous action of three forces—the positive, the negative, and the neutralizing."
In Search of the Miraculous, pg 122

"The next fundamental law of the universe is the law of seven or the law of octaves...[it] gives us an entirely new explanation of the whole of life, of the progress and development of phenomena on all planes of the universe observed by us."
In Search of the Miraculous, pgs 122 & 126