Top 66 Sufis Way Quotes
#1. Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.
Idries Shah
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Idries Shah
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi.
Idries Shah
#9. Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
Idries Shah
#11. Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.
Idries Shah
#12. 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
#13. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity.
Idries Shah
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.
Idries Shah
#17. Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.
Idries Shah
#18. Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.
Idries Shah
#19. To say "yes" to the Sufi way is to say "no" to imagined escapes.
Idries Shah
#20. A short time in the presence of the Friends (the Sufis) is better than a hundred years' sincere, obedient dedication.
Idries Shah
#21. You will always have doubts, but only discover them at a useful time for your weakness to point them out.
Idries Shah
#22. Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.
Idries Shah
#23. When you feel least interested in following the Way which you have entered, this may be the time when it is most appropriate for you.
Idries Shah
#24. You may have forgotten the Way:
But those who came before
Did not forget you.
Saying of Master Bahaudin Naqshband of Bokhara
Idries Shah
#25. I longed to teach, but I had to wait until the desire had left me before I could really do so.
Idries Shah
#26. HE is a Master who may teach without it being totally labelled teaching; HE is a student who can learn without being obsessed by learning.
Idries Shah
#27. 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
#28. But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school.
Idries Shah
#29. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Wisdom: Something you can learn without knowing it.
Idries Shah
#30. Trying to force something is the best way to stop it happening.
Idries Shah
#31. The pathways into Sufic thinking are, it is traditionally said, almost as varied as the number of Sufis in existence.
Idries Shah
#32. The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
Huston Smith
#33. The power of Allah: no sound, no shape, no form. But when it manifests, none can resist it.
Idries Shah
#34. The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.
Idries Shah
#35. 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
#36. The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is "not" in their destiny.
Idries Shah
#37. 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
#38. Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.
Idries Shah
#39. 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
#40. BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL.
Idries Shah
#41. The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.
Idries Shah
#42. If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
Idries Shah
#43. Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.
Idries Shah
#44. In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
#46. Our heads are filled with 'knowledge', a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
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. Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
Idries Shah
#50. 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
#51. Helping others
I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Moslem or not.
Idries Shah
#53. Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path.
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. 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
#56. 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
#57. The spirit is the mirror; the body is the rust.
(Divan-i-Shamsi Tabriz)
Idries Shah
#58. Saying of the Prophet
Obligation to Learn
The pursuit of knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.
Idries Shah
#59. Those who can't, try: those who can, don't have to.
Idries Shah
#60. People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Idries Shah
#61. You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
Florence Nightingale
#62. Whoever might perfume a scorpion
Will not thereby escape its sting. Bahaudin Naqshband
Idries Shah
#63. With enough information, it is almost impossible "not" to predict people's action.
Idries Shah
#64. Assume that you are part-hypocrite and part heedless, and you will not be far wrong.
Idries Shah
#65. You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
#66. Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
