"You are a man and like any man you deserve everything that is a man's lot — joy, pain, sadness and struggle. The nature of one's acts is unimportant as long as one acts as a warrior. If you really feel that your spirit is distorted you should simply fix it — purge it, make it perfect — because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit is to seek death, and that is the same as to seek nothing, since death is going to overtake us regardless of anything. To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood.

No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that. It doesn't jibe with the life of a warrior.

The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. 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.

You are here, with me, because you want to be here. You should have assumed full responsibility by now, so the idea that you are at the mercy of the wind would be inadmissible.

Self-pity doesn't jibe with power. The mood of a warrior calls for control over himself and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself."


–Carlos Castaneda, excerpted from "Journey to Ixtlan"