Top 100 Quotes About Sufism
#1. Helping others
I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.
Idries Shah
#3. Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
Idries Shah
#4. If you cannot sit on a throne like a king, seize, like a tent-pitcher, the rope of the Royal tent.
Idries Shah
#5. Our heads are filled with 'knowledge', a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Idries Shah
#7. Our thoughts have prepared for us the
happiness or unhappiness we experience.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#8. But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
Idries Shah
#9. In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
#10. The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.
Idries Shah
#11. If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
Idries Shah
#12. The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.
Idries Shah
#13. BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL.
Idries Shah
#14. Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.
Idries Shah
#15. 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
#16. The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is "not" in their destiny.
Idries Shah
#17. 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
#18. Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.
Idries Shah
#19. Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path.
Idries Shah
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Idries Shah
#24. The spirit is the mirror; the body is the rust.
(Divan-i-Shamsi Tabriz)
Idries Shah
#25. Saying of the Prophet
Obligation to Learn
The pursuit of knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.
Idries Shah
#26. Those who can't, try: those who can, don't have to.
Idries Shah
#27. People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Idries Shah
#28. Whoever might perfume a scorpion
Will not thereby escape its sting. Bahaudin Naqshband
Idries Shah
#29. The only thing I know is that a person who is not busy with others is one who recognizes the truth of existence.
Sadegh M. Angha
#30. With enough information, it is almost impossible "not" to predict people's action.
Idries Shah
#31. Politics is the application of Sufism to earthlife ... To refuse to act politically is to starve your children, destroy civilization.
Shamcher Bryn Beorse
#33. Assume that you are part-hypocrite and part heedless, and you will not be far wrong.
Idries Shah
#34. You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
#35. Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
#36. Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.
Idries Shah
#37. Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.
Idries Shah
#38. Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.
Idries Shah
#39. 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
#40. You must empty out the dirty water before you fill the pitcher with clean.
Idries Shah
#41. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity.
Idries Shah
#42. Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.
Idries Shah
#43. Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.
Idries Shah
#44. Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
Idries Shah
#45. The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real
Idries Shah
#46. The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi.
Idries Shah
#47. I want a God that makes me twirl.' I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it would flow like a robe. 'Like this. I can do this for God.' I held my hands out. I twirled and twirled and twirled. 'Look,' I said. 'Look.
Rabih Alameddine
#48. 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
#49. Saying of the Prophet
Truth
Speaking the truth to the unjust is the best of holy wars.
Idries Shah
#50. The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service
Idries Shah
#51. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Poverty: The result of marriage.
Idries Shah
#52. 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
#53. Unbelief and belief are both marching on His road, while both are saying, 'He is one and He has no associates'.
Idries Shah
#54. But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH 'things of the world'.
Idries Shah
#55. 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
#56. Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Idries Shah
#57. When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
Idries Shah
#58. There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.
Idries Shah
#59. Until you can understand illogicality, and the meaningfulness of it, shun the Sufis except for limited, precise, self-evident services.
Idries Shah
#60. 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
#62. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Patience: A support for the disappointed.
Idries Shah
#63. THE HEAVENS
To the mallet of the Highest Mind
The heavens are the smallest possible ball.
(Akhlaq-i-Mohsini)
Idries Shah
#64. 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
#65. What you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.
Idries Shah
#66. Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Idries Shah
#67. That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in Sufism, the human soul (ruh).
Idries Shah
#69. The Sufis say, "This is not a religion; it is religion
Idries Shah
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The real generosity is when a man does something generous when nobody knows about it.
Idries Shah
#74. Saying of the Prophet
Reflection
The Faithful are mirrors, one to the other.
Idries Shah
#76. A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.
Idries Shah
#77. Inner Knowledge
You want to become wise in one lesson: First become a real human being.
Idries Shah
#78. A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.
Idries Shah
#79. The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!
Idries Shah
#80. Saying of the Prophet
Accusations
Anyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.
Idries Shah
#81. A Sufi is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything
Idries Shah
#82. Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.
Idries Shah
#84. I think that Sufism fits all over the world. The concept is not anything that fits standard Western ideas - it's always related to culture, to music, to religion. It is a dominant religion in Senegal.
Youssou N'Dour
#85. No effort makes a black crow into a white hawk.
Idries Shah
#86. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza.
Worry: Something to make you unnecessarily ill.
Idries Shah
#87. You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.
Idries Shah
#88. People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Idries Shah
#89. 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
#91. Be kind to the hawk and harm the sparrow.
Idries Shah
#92. The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all. Ibn Arabi.
Idries Shah
#94. If you want to be a calligrapher, write, and write, and write.
Idries Shah
#95. The teaching must, of course, work with the best part of the individual, must be directed to his or her real capacity.
Idries Shah
#96. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Truthful man:
He who is, secretly, regarded by everyone as an enemy.
Idries Shah
#97. 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
#98. Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets; many who are in their graves are in reality alive.
Idries Shah
#99. Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.
Idries Shah
#100. Saying of the Mulla Nasrudin. If I survive this life without dying, I'll be surprised.
Idries Shah
