Quotes About Sufis

#1. Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

Huston Smith

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

Idries Shah

#3. Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God's essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?

Reza Aslan

#4. Sufis are keys to open up hearts.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri

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

Idries Shah

#6. You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.

Florence Nightingale

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

Idries Shah

#8. 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

#9. The Sufis have a saying: "Praise Allah, and tie your camel to a post." This brings together both parts of practice: pray, yes, but also make sure that you do what is necessary in the world.

Jack Kornfield

#10. The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are the necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?'

Eknath Easwaran

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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#15. Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl

Rumi

#16. 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

#17. Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.

Idries Shah

#18. Dance with the sufis, celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain.

Tori Amos

#19. The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the
spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics

Karen Armstrong

#20. A short time in the presence of the Friends (the Sufis) is better than a hundred years' sincere, obedient dedication.

Idries Shah

#21. Sufis (the name for the realised individual, not the learner or follower) are reunited with objective Reality and Unity.

Idries Shah

#22. The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.

Idries Shah

#23. The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.

Idries Shah

#24. Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.

Idries Shah

#25. 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

#26. It is no accident that Sufis find that they can connect most constructively with people who are well integrated into the world, as well as having higher aims, and that those who adopt a sensible attitude towards society and life as generally known can usually absorb Sufi teachings very well indeed

Idries Shah

#27. The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

Luke Rhinehart

#28. There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.

Idries Shah

#29. Sufis are not here to satisfy a demand. They exist to share what they have got. These two things are not always the same.

Idries Shah

#30. Many Sufis are not guides.

Idries Shah

#31. Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#32. The Sufis have said: 'The importance of something is in inverse proportion to its attractiveness.

Idries Shah

#33. The Sufis are unanimous that a Guide (Sheikh) is absolutely essential, though never available on demand: 'the Sufis are not merchants'.

Idries Shah

#34. The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.

Pico Iyer

#35. I don't know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystic experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?

Tony Campolo

#36. Love is the true God - not the God of theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis.

Osho

#37. Hildegard von Bingen conveys spiritual ecstasy, if we're talking of Western music. What bothers me about Western music is that it doesn't have an esoteric dimension in the way the music of the East has, whether it be Byzantine chant, the music of the Sufis, or Hindu music.

John Tavener

#38. The pathways into Sufic thinking are, it is traditionally said, almost as varied as the number of Sufis in existence.

Idries Shah

#39. The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds

Idries Shah

#40. One of the great Sufis said: 'A saint is a saint unless he knows that he is one.

Idries Shah

#41. It is the message, not the man, which is important to the Sufis.

Idries Shah

#42. The practice of the Sufis is too sublime to have a formal beginning,

Idries Shah

#43. The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

Huston Smith

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

Idries Shah

#45. No colour comes after black.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#49. Sufism is experiential

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#55. 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

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

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

Idries Shah

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#74. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#79. The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#81. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#85. 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

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

Idries Shah

#87. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#91. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#94. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#98. Truth has no form.

Idries Shah

#99. Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition

Idries Shah

#100. 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