Top 100 Idries Shah Quotes
#1. If you cannot sit on a throne like a king, seize, like a tent-pitcher, the rope of the Royal tent.
Idries Shah
#2. BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL.
Idries Shah
#3. EPITAPH OF JALALUDIN RUMI
When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.
Idries Shah
#4. All approaches to a study or an individual may start with a desire for attention. However they start, they must never end up in this manner.
Idries Shah
#5. You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.
Idries Shah
#6. People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Idries Shah
#7. Whoever might perfume a scorpion
Will not thereby escape its sting. Bahaudin Naqshband
Idries Shah
#8. Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
#9. Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.
Idries Shah
#10. Unbelief and belief are both marching on His road, while both are saying, 'He is one and He has no associates'.
Idries Shah
#11. There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.
Idries Shah
#12. Until you can understand illogicality, and the meaningfulness of it, shun the Sufis except for limited, precise, self-evident services.
Idries Shah
#13. Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience and you will know'.
Idries Shah
#14. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Patience: A support for the disappointed.
Idries Shah
#15. The Sufis say, "This is not a religion; it is religion
Idries Shah
#16. Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.
Idries Shah
#18. You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.
Idries Shah
#19. If you want to be a calligrapher, write, and write, and write.
Idries Shah
#20. The teaching must, of course, work with the best part of the individual, must be directed to his or her real capacity.
Idries Shah
#21. Saying of the Mulla Nasrudin. If I survive this life without dying, I'll be surprised.
Idries Shah
#22. Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.
Idries Shah
#23. Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.
Idries Shah
#24. It is the goldsmith who can assay the gold.
Idries Shah
#25. SOVEREIGNTY
Sovereignty is a wind of change.
(Hariri)
Idries Shah
#26. Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.
Idries Shah
#27. The donkey which brought you to this door must be dismissed if you want to get through it'.
Idries Shah
#28. What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.
Idries Shah
#29. When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.
Idries Shah
#30. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Supporter: Someone who will say anything.
Idries Shah
#31. You can learn more in half an hour's direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of formal effort.
Idries Shah
#32. The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.
Idries Shah
#33. Show a man too many camels' bones,or show them to him too often,and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one.
Idries Shah
#34. Saying of the Prophet
Some behaviour
I am like a man who has lighted a fire, and all the creeping things have rushed to burn themselves in it.
Idries Shah
#35. Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.
Idries Shah
#36. We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.
Idries Shah
#37. Sufism is that which succeeds in bringing to man the High Knowledge.
Idries Shah
#38. Everyone does not know the secrets of Truth
The States of Truth are not evidential.
Idries Shah
#39. The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.
Idries Shah
#40. The problem is that the spurious, the unreal, the untrue is so much easier to find that it is in danger of becoming the norm.
Idries Shah
#41. If you are covetous, you are a prisoner: If you are greedy, you will never be filled.
Idries Shah
#42. People talk about 'service, effort, love, knowledge'. But with knowledge you know what love is, and what it is not.
Idries Shah
#43. Sufism is experiential. Capacities, even those for learning beyond a certain point, are provoked by Sufis, by one's own efforts and what results from them, and by an element of what is referred to by Sufis as the Divine.
Idries Shah
#44. It is not only a matter of not caring who knows - it is also a matter of knowing who cares.
Idries Shah
#45. Mediation - Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be.
Idries Shah
#46. Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.
Idries Shah
#47. Sufism is, in fact, not a mystical system, not a religion, but a body of knowledge.
Idries Shah
#48. Nothing can defile the Sufi, and he in fact purifies everything." Abu-Turab al-Nakhsabi.
Idries Shah
#49. Knowledge cannot be attained except through humility.
Idries Shah
#50. One cannot learn from someone whom one distrusts.
Idries Shah
#51. Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: 'What did you do that?' Junaid said: 'I was bowing before his single-mindedness. For his aim, that man has given his life.
Idries Shah
#53. The sort of man who, throwing a stone upon the ground, would miss.
Idries Shah
#54. It is not enough that there is a collection of people with the common aim of working in unison towards an objective ... Aspiration and desire only are not enough.
Idries Shah
#55. There is a saying that, according to what a person's mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
#56. Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them.
Idries Shah
#57. Sufi secrets are perceived, not understood by words.
Idries Shah
#59. Like calls to like, truth to truth and deceit to deceit.
Idries Shah
#60. He who knows himself, knows his Lord' means, among other things, that self-deception prevents knowledge.
Idries Shah
#61. Better to quarrel with a friend than to support enemies.
Idries Shah
#62. Hariri says, in his Maqamat: 'Safety is on the river's BANK.
Idries Shah
#63. He is the completed Man who, from his completeness, performs, with his Mastership, the work of a slave.
Idries Shah
#64. The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.
Idries Shah
#65. Before garden, vine or grape was in the world," writes one, "our soul was drunken with immortal wine.
Idries Shah
#66. When there is a true or useful thing, there is sure to be a counterfeit.
Idries Shah
#67. Saying of the Prophet
Struggle
The holy warrior is he who struggles with himself.
Idries Shah
#68. The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
Idries Shah
#69. Voice in the night
A voice whispered to me last night: 'There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night!
Idries Shah
#70. Whoever has taught me one letter has made me his slave.
Idries Shah
#71. Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
Idries Shah
#72. In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.
Idries Shah
#73. Saying of the Prophet
Understanding
Speak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.
Idries Shah
#74. Saying of the Prophet
Women
Women are the twin-halves of men.
Idries Shah
#75. If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
Idries Shah
#76. Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's?
A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room.
Idries Shah
#77. Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind.
Idries Shah
#78. Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do.
Idries Shah
#79. Feeling important is a vice, not a virtue, however concealed as participation in something noble.
Idries Shah
#80. The major barrier to understanding is wishful thinking and following that which pleases one.
Idries Shah
#81. It is not Sufism if it does not perform its function for you. A cloak is no longer a cloak if it does not keep a man warm.
Idries Shah
#82. A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions.
Idries Shah
#83. Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained
Idries Shah
#84. Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Idries Shah
#85. If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth.
Idries Shah
#86. When you are still fragmentated, lacking certainty - what difference does it make what your decisions are?
Idries Shah
#87. Saying of the Prophet
Helping others
I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Muslim or not.
Idries Shah
#88. Trying to force something is the best way to stop it happening.
Idries Shah
#89. And Rumi tells us, 'Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue'.
Idries Shah
#90. Do not tell your secrets to everyone in this headquarters, Earth. We have surveyed it well. There was nobody to whom to entrust secrets.
Idries Shah
#91. Almost every day I am reminded of Saadi's reflection that there is no senseless tyranny like that of subordinates.
Idries Shah
#92. Sufism is always systematised only for limited or transitory periods: because Sufism is primarly instrumental, not for enjoyment or display.
Idries Shah
#93. The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.
Idries Shah
#95. It is the message, not the man, which is important to the Sufis.
Idries Shah
#96. As swords were designed to kill
They did well to make them tongue-shaped.
(Anwar-i-Suhaili)
Idries Shah
#97. Not to be greedy is, paradoxically, the highest form of looking after one's true interests.
Idries Shah
#99. When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.
Idries Shah
#100. The power of Allah: no sound, no shape, no form. But when it manifests, none can resist it.
Idries Shah
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