The Study House Inscriptions
In 1924, at the Château du Prieuré near Fontainebleau, France, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff had thirty-eight aphorisms inscribed on the walls of the Study House — a converted aircraft hangar that served as the central meeting place for his students. These weren't decorations. They were reminders, challenges, and shocks designed to interrupt mechanical thinking.
Each time students entered that space, these words confronted them. Some aphorisms offered comfort, others stung with uncomfortable truth. Together they formed a mosaic of the Work's essential principles.
What follows are these original aphorisms, preserved exactly as Gurdjieff presented them. They require no interpretation — only contemplation. Read slowly. Let each one work on you before moving to the next.
On Self-Work
Like what 'it' does not like.
The 'it' is the mechanical self — the collection of habits, preferences, and aversions that runs our lives. To go against 'it' deliberately is to begin creating something real.
The highest that a man can attain is to be able to do.
Most human activity is reaction, not action. True doing — intentional, conscious action — is extraordinarily rare and represents the pinnacle of human development.
The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, always provided you remember the work.
Difficulties are fuel. But only if consciousness is present. Without remembering, suffering is merely suffering.
Remember yourself always and everywhere.
The central practice. The essential effort. Everything else follows from this.
Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.
Others are not obstacles. They are teachers. Every friction, every annoyance, every difficulty with another person is material for the Work.
On This Place
Here we can only direct and create conditions, but not help.
A teacher can point the way and establish circumstances for work. But no one can do your work for you.
Know that this house can be useful only to those who have recognized their nothingness and who believe in the possibility of changing.
Two requirements: humility about one's current state, and faith in the possibility of transformation. Without both, nothing can happen.
On Conscience and Action
If you already know it is bad and do it, you commit a sin difficult to redress.
Mechanical wrongdoing is one thing. Conscious wrongdoing creates a deeper wound — one that requires far more effort to heal.
The chief means of happiness in this life is the ability to consider externally always, internally never.
External consideration means genuine attention to others' needs and situations. Internal considering is self-pity, self-importance, feeling slighted. The first leads to freedom; the second to slavery.
On Art and Feeling
Do not love art with your feelings.
Sentimental appreciation of art is mechanical. Real understanding of art requires all centers — feeling, yes, but also intelligence and physical sensation working together.
On Human Relations
A true sign of a good man is if he loves his father and mother.
Not sentimental love, but real love — which includes acceptance of who they are, with all their limitations and failures.
Judge others by yourself and you will rarely be mistaken.
You know your own weaknesses, self-deceptions, and mechanical reactions. Others are the same. This knowledge breeds both understanding and caution.
Only help him who is not an idler.
Effort must be met with effort. Help given to those who will not work is wasted — and may even harm both parties.
Respect every religion.
Each tradition carries fragments of truth, expressed through different forms. Contempt for any path reveals one's own limitations.
Love him who loves work.
Not work for reward, but work itself — conscious effort for its own sake. Those who love such work are rare and deserve recognition.
On Faith and Aspiration
We can only strive to be able to be Christians.
The title is not claimed lightly. To truly follow any authentic teaching requires transformation that most have barely begun.
On Understanding Others
Don't judge a man by the tales of others.
Opinions are passed mechanically from person to person. Direct observation is the only reliable source.
Consider what people think of you — not what they say.
Words can be polite or cruel regardless of underlying thought. Attention to the reality beneath speech reveals more than listening to speech itself.
On Knowledge and Development
Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West — and then seek.
Neither tradition alone is complete. The East developed understanding of inner work; the West developed practical knowledge of the outer world. Both are needed, and the seeker must integrate them personally.
Only he who can take care of what belongs to others may have his own.
Before one can possess anything truly, one must demonstrate the capacity for responsibility. This applies to knowledge as much as to material things.
On Suffering
Only conscious suffering has any sense.
Mechanical suffering — the suffering that happens to us — teaches nothing. Conscious suffering — suffering we take upon ourselves intentionally for a purpose — transforms.
On Justice and Love
It is better to be temporarily an egoist than never to be just.
False selflessness that ignores what is right does more harm than honest self-interest. Justice requires clarity that sentimentality destroys.
Practice love first on animals, they are more sensitive.
Animals cannot deceive themselves or others about love. They respond to what is real. Practice on them reveals one's actual capacity for love, stripped of social performance.
On Teaching
By teaching others you will learn yourself.
The effort to transmit understanding reveals gaps in one's own comprehension. Teaching is a form of self-study.
Remember that here work is not for work's sake but is only a means.
The activities of the Work are not ends in themselves. They are methods for self-development. Forgetting this turns the Work into another form of sleep.
On Justice Continued
Only he can be just who is able to put himself in the position of others.
Mechanical judgment is always partial. Real justice requires the ability to see from multiple perspectives simultaneously.
On Critical Thinking
If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying here is useless.
Gurdjieff did not want believers. He wanted people who could verify ideas through their own observation and experience.
On Time and Effort
He who has freed himself of the disease of 'tomorrow' has a chance to attain what he came here for.
Postponement is the great enemy. The Work is always now. 'Tomorrow' is a dream that never arrives.
On the Soul
Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.
Those without a soul live as nature intended — mechanical but harmonious. Those with a developed soul have attained. But those in between — aware enough to see their condition, not developed enough to transcend it — suffer most.
On Rest and Energy
Rest comes not from the quantity but from the quality of sleep.
Conscious relaxation restores more than long periods of mechanical sleep. It is how one sleeps, not how long.
Sleep little without regret.
Regret about lost sleep is more exhausting than the sleep deprivation itself. Accept conditions; do not waste energy on complaint.
The energy spent on active inner work is then and there transformed into a fresh supply.
Unlike physical work, which depletes, conscious inner work generates energy. This is one of its mysteries.
On Urgency
One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.
Death is certain; its timing is not. This fact, truly absorbed, changes everything. But keeping it in mind requires special effort — the mind tends to forget what is uncomfortable.
On Love, Faith, and Hope
Conscious love evokes the same in response. Emotional love evokes the opposite. Physical love depends on type and polarity.
Three kinds of love, with three kinds of results. Only conscious love creates genuine connection.
Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.
Faith verified by experience liberates. Faith based on feeling binds to those feelings. Faith adopted without thought is dangerous.
Hope, when bold, is strength. Hope, with doubt, is cowardice. Hope, with fear, is weakness.
The quality of hope matters more than hope itself. Bold hope — without guarantees — empowers. Hesitant hope weakens.
On Experience
Man is given a definite number of experiences — economizing them, he prolongs his life.
This mysterious statement suggests that life is measured not in time but in impressions. Rushing through experiences mechanically wastes them. Conscious experience is more economical — and richer.
On Unity
Here there are neither Russians nor English, Jews nor Christians, but only those who pursue one aim — to be able to be.
In the Work, all external distinctions become irrelevant. Only the aim matters. Only the effort toward Being.
Working with the Aphorisms
These inscriptions are not meant for passive reading. They are tools for work.
Choose one. Let it live with you for a day, a week, a month. Notice when life presents situations where it applies. Notice your resistance to its truth. Notice the moment it stops being words and becomes understanding.
Use them as shocks. When you find yourself mechanical, remembering an aphorism can provide the shock needed to awaken, if only briefly.
Let them question you. Each aphorism is a mirror. What do you see in it? What does it reveal about your current state?
Don't collect them. Having thirty-eight aphorisms in mind simultaneously is mechanical accumulation. One aphorism truly understood is worth more than all of them memorized.
Historical Note
The Prieuré (officially the Château du Prieuré des Basses Loges) was Gurdjieff's institute from 1922 until the 1930s. The Study House, where these aphorisms were displayed, was where the sacred dances (Movements) were practiced and where Gurdjieff gave many of his talks. Though the building was later destroyed by fire, photographs and the memories of students have preserved the content of these wall inscriptions.
Sources
Thomas de Hartmann & Olga de Hartmann, Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff
P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous
J.G. Bennett, Witness: The Autobiography of John G. Bennett
William Patrick Patterson, Struggle of the Magicians