Anyone reading and hearing this book feels clearly that everything in it is fantasy, but fantasy corresponding to truth, even though composed of episodes which are quite improbable for the ordinary life of people. But, the author's permanent exhortation remains as an underlying patterning behind all these aspects of life itself. Even when the truth expressed is harsh, the substrate of aspiration never deviates. But this is no dark mystery and we are very far from supposed black magic, from malevolent powers. It is not a question of to whom a man prays, but a question of his faith.
Faith is conscience, the foundation of which is laid in childhood.
If a man changes his religion, he loses his conscience, and conscience is the most valuable thing in a man. And it is doubtless not for nothing that, within the exemplary portraits, we find slipped in, as experiences undergone, large unavoidable problems, regions of essential darkness around which our knowledge revolves. Forty-five years you have worked, suffered and laboured incessantly, and not once did you decide for yourself or know how to work so that, if only for a few months, the desire of your mind should become the desire of your heart. If only from the historical point of view, Remarkable Men helps us to better understand the body of Gurdjieff's work. Gurdjieff's childhood, his adolescence, his formative years appear in broad outline.