A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.

Knowledge is a most peculiar affair, especially for a warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.

Knowledge comes to a warrior, floating, like specks of gold dust, the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So for a warrior, knowledge is like taking a shower, or being rained on by specks of dark gold dust.

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words.

The world is unfathomable. And so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world.

Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over walls; they don't demolish them.

A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything needed for the extravagant journey that is his life. What counts for a warrior is being alive. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.

Therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive.

An average man thinks that indulging in doubts and tribulations is the sign of sensitivity, spirituality. The truth of the matter is that the average man is the farthest thing imaginable from being sensitive. His puny reason deliberately makes itself into a monster or a saint, but it is truthfully too little for such a big monster or saint mold.

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

A warrior dies the hard way. His death must struggle to take him. A warrior does not give himself to death so easily.

Human beings are not objects; they have no solidity. They are round, luminous beings; they are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is only a description that was created to help them, to make their passage on earth convenient.

Their reason makes them forget that the description is only a description, and before they realize it, human beings have entrapped the totality of themselves in a vicious circle from which they rarely emerge in their lifetimes.

Human beings are perceivers, but the world that they perceive is an illusion: an illusion created by the description that was told to them from the moment they were born.

So in essence, the world that their reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which their reason learns to accept and defend.

The concealed advantage of luminous beings is that they have something which is never used: intent. The maneuver of shamans is the same as the maneuver of the average man. Both have a description of the world. The average man upholds it with his reason; the shaman upholds it with his intent. Both descriptions have their rules; but the advantage of the shaman is that intent is more engulfing than reason.

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or as a curse.

The trump card of the warrior is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior can't just say he believes and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe without any exertion would exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice. A warrior doesn't believe, a warrior has to believe.

Death is the indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the awareness of death, everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only because death is stalking him that a warrior has to believe that the world is an unfathomable mystery. Having to believe in such a fashion is the warrior's expression of his innermost predilection.

Power always makes a cubic centimeter of chance available to a warrior. The warrior's art is to be perennially fluid in order to pluck it.

The average man is aware of everything only when he thinks he should be; the condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times.

The totality of ourselves is a very mysterious affair. We need only a very small portion of it to fulfill the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves.

A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power.

When a warrior makes the decision to take action, he should be prepared to die. If he is prepared to die, there shouldn't be any pitfalls, any unwelcome surprises, any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently fall into place because he is expecting nothing.

A warrior, as a teacher, must first of all teach about the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting rewards – acting just for the hell of it. His success as a teacher depends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his wards in this specific respect.

In order to help his ward to erase personal history, the warrior as a teacher teaches three techniques: losing self-importance, assuming responsibility for one's acts, and using death as an adviser. Without the beneficial effect of these three techniques, erasing personal history would involve being shifty, evasive and unnecessarily dubious about oneself and one's actions.

There is no way to get rid of self-pity for good; it has a definite place and character in our lives, a definite facade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, the facade of self-pity becomes active. It has a history. But if one changes the facade, one shifts its place of prominence.

One changes facades by shifting the component elements of the facade itself. Self-pity is useful to the user because he feels important and deserving of better conditions, better treatment, or because he is unwilling to assume responsibility for the acts that brought him to the state that elicited self-pity.

Changing the facade of self-pity means only that one has assigned a secondary place to a formerly important element. Self-pity is still a prominent feature; but it has now taken a position in the background, in the same fashion that the idea of one's impending death, the idea of a warrior's humbleness, or the idea of responsibility for one's acts were all in the background at one time for a warrior, without ever being used until the moment he became a warrior.