Sufism And Life Quotes

#1. The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living.

Idries Shah

#2. 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

#3. However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can't run away from your own feet.

Idries Shah

#4. Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.

Idries Shah

#5. 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

#6. Treat this world as I do, like a wayfarer; like a horseman who stops in the shade of a tree for a time, and then moves on.

Idries Shah

#7. Saadi's dictum, in the Bostan: 'The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe

Idries Shah

#8. Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.

Idries Shah

#9. They asked Abboud of Omdurman: 'Which is better, to be young or to be old?' He said: 'To be old is to have less time before you and more mistakes behind. I leave you to decide whether this is better than the reverse.

Idries Shah

#10. Wisdom
Sufian said:
'The wisdom which is invisible but which sustains is a hundred times better than the appearance of wisdom, for that has itself to be sustained.

Idries Shah

#11. But now she wasn't sure if she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century.

Elif Shafak

#12. He was everyone and every living creature in one ecstatic motion.

Soroosh Shahrivar

#13. 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

#14. Love is an involuntary gift that manifests unplanned.

Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

#15. They have fixed our nutrition and arranged our life-span. More than this, and ahead of this, efforts will not be productive.

Idries Shah

#16. Sufism, in one definition, "is" human life.

Idries Shah

#17. The first lesson to learn is to resign oneself to the little difficulties in life, not to hit out at everything one comes up against. If one were able to manage this one would not need to cultivate great power; even one's presence would be healing.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#18. Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?

Idries Shah

#19. Practise your knowledge, for knowledge without practice is a body without life

Idries Shah

#20. Saying of the Mulla Nasrudin. If I survive this life without dying, I'll be surprised.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#22. 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

#23. Selfishness keeps man blind through life.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#24. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#27. Sufism is known by means of itself.

Idries Shah

#28. Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets; many who are in their graves are in reality alive.

Idries Shah

#29. Sufism is experiential

Idries Shah

#30. Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

Idries Shah

#31. Sufism," according to the Sufi, "is an adventure in living, necessary adventure.

Idries Shah

#32. To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.

Idries Shah

#33. What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.

Idries Shah

#34. I reject any path which rejects life, but I can't help loving Sufism because it sounds so beautiful. It gives relief in the midst of battle.

Naguib Mahfouz

#35. There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#36. A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

Idries Shah

#37. Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.

Idries Shah