Idries Shah Quotes

#1. There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.

Idries Shah

#2. Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition

Idries Shah

#3. The Sufis say, "This is not a religion; it is religion

Idries Shah

#4. Truth has no form.

Idries Shah

#5. That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in Sufism, the human soul (ruh).

Idries Shah

#6. Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.

Idries Shah

#7. What you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.

Idries Shah

#8. You have come a long way, and you do not know it. You have a long way to do, and you do know what that means.

Idries Shah

#9. THE HEAVENS
To the mallet of the Highest Mind
The heavens are the smallest possible ball.
(Akhlaq-i-Mohsini)

Idries Shah

#10. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Patience: A support for the disappointed.

Idries Shah

#11. People cannot handle prejudice because they try to deal with the symptom. Prejudice is the symptom, wrong assumptions are the cause.
'Prejudice is the daughter of assumption.

Idries Shah

#12. 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

#13. Until you can understand illogicality, and the meaningfulness of it, shun the Sufis except for limited, precise, self-evident services.

Idries Shah

#14. The aspirant has to be guided by a mentor. The stage at which this guidance can take effect is seldom, if ever, perceptible to the learner.

Idries Shah

#15. When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.

Idries Shah

#16. Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.

Idries Shah

#17. Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

Idries Shah

#18. You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so.
I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.

Idries Shah

#19. But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH 'things of the world'.

Idries Shah

#20. Unbelief and belief are both marching on His road, while both are saying, 'He is one and He has no associates'.

Idries Shah

#21. THE BIRD AND THE WATER
A bird which has not heard of fresh water
Dips his beak in salt-water year after year.
(Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Idries Shah

#22. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Poverty: The result of marriage.

Idries Shah

#23. The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service

Idries Shah

#24. Saying of the Prophet
Truth
Speaking the truth to the unjust is the best of holy wars.

Idries Shah

#25. Knowledge. How curious that a man who closes his hand upon air so often thinks that he has a ruby within his grasp.

Idries Shah

#26. Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.

Idries Shah

#27. The teaching must, of course, work with the best part of the individual, must be directed to his or her real capacity.

Idries Shah

#28. If you want to be a calligrapher, write, and write, and write.

Idries Shah

#29. A stolen kiss is not easily returned.

Idries Shah

#30. The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all. Ibn Arabi.

Idries Shah

#31. Be kind to the hawk and harm the sparrow.

Idries Shah

#32. Sufism is known by means of itself.

Idries Shah

#33. Sufis hold that the superior experience and knowledge comes to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth,capacity,and earning of it.

Idries Shah

#34. People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.

Idries Shah

#35. You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.

Idries Shah

#36. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza.
Worry: Something to make you unnecessarily ill.

Idries Shah

#37. No effort makes a black crow into a white hawk.

Idries Shah

#38. Sufism is, in operation, pragmatic.

Idries Shah

#39. Talent is the presence of ability and absence of understanding about the source and operation of knowledge.

Idries Shah

#40. If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.

Idries Shah

#41. A Sufi is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything

Idries Shah

#42. Saying of the Prophet
Accusations
Anyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.

Idries Shah

#43. The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!

Idries Shah

#44. A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.

Idries Shah

#45. Inner Knowledge
You want to become wise in one lesson: First become a real human being.

Idries Shah

#46. A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.

Idries Shah

#47. The liar has a bad memory.

Idries Shah

#48. Saying of the Prophet
Reflection
The Faithful are mirrors, one to the other.

Idries Shah

#49. The real generosity is when a man does something generous when nobody knows about it.

Idries Shah

#50. If ... says: 'Do not be greedy, be generous', you may inwardly interpret this in such a manner that you will develop a greed for generosity

Idries Shah

#51. It is not always a question of the Emperor having no clothes on. Sometimes it is, 'Is that an Emperor at all?

Idries Shah

#52. Death
If he is a good man, death will be a release;
If he is a bad one, it will release others from him.

Idries Shah

#53. Remedy
Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.
Hazrat Ali

Idries Shah

#54. 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

#55. Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path.

Idries Shah

#56. Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.

Idries Shah

#57. 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

#58. The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is "not" in their destiny.

Idries Shah

#59. 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

#60. Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.

Idries Shah

#61. BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL.

Idries Shah

#62. The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.

Idries Shah

#63. If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.

Idries Shah

#64. Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

Idries Shah

#65. The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.

Idries Shah

#66. Two people can illustrate crudity to you.
The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.
The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.

Idries Shah

#67. An egocentric pessimist is a person who thinks he hasn't changed, but that other people are behaving worse than before.

Idries Shah

#68. In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.

Idries Shah

#69. But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.

Idries Shah

#70. Sufism is experiential

Idries Shah

#71. People used to play with toys.
Now the toys play with them.

Idries Shah

#72. Our heads are filled with 'knowledge', a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.

Idries Shah

#73. If you cannot sit on a throne like a king, seize, like a tent-pitcher, the rope of the Royal tent.

Idries Shah

#74. Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.

Idries Shah

#75. No colour comes after black.

Idries Shah

#76. Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.

Idries Shah

#77. The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi.

Idries Shah

#78. The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real

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#79. Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.

Idries Shah

#80. Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.

Idries Shah

#81. Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.

Idries Shah

#82. Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.

Idries Shah

#83. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity.

Idries Shah

#84. You must empty out the dirty water before you fill the pitcher with clean.

Idries Shah

#85. Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

Idries Shah

#86. These lecture provide material for the consideration of common factors, in theory and in development, from the viewpoint of the idea of surrender to the Divine Will, reviewing some aspects of the interplay between Christians and Moslems, and introducing material from and about Sufis.

Idries Shah

#87. Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.

Idries Shah

#88. Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.

Idries Shah

#89. Helping others
I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.

Idries Shah

#90. Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.

Idries Shah

#91. You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.

Idries Shah

#92. No duty is ignoble. What can be ignoble is the sight of people trying not to be ignoble.

Idries Shah

#93. Assume that you are part-hypocrite and part heedless, and you will not be far wrong.

Idries Shah

#94. With enough information, it is almost impossible "not" to predict people's action.

Idries Shah

#95. Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.

Idries Shah

#96. Whoever might perfume a scorpion
Will not thereby escape its sting. Bahaudin Naqshband

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#97. People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

Idries Shah

#98. Those who can't, try: those who can, don't have to.

Idries Shah

#99. Saying of the Prophet
Obligation to Learn
The pursuit of knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.

Idries Shah

#100. The spirit is the mirror; the body is the rust.
(Divan-i-Shamsi Tabriz)

Idries Shah