Sufism Wisdom Quotes

#1. As with any other specialisation, teaching is a vocation, open only to those who are truly capable of discharging its functions.

Idries Shah

#2. When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration.

Idries Shah

#3. Deteriorated science is a cult, so is imitative or deteriorated Sufism.

Idries Shah

#4. A man's capacity is the same as his breadth of vision.

Idries Shah

#5. ANDAKI: EFFORT IS NOT EFFORT WITHOUT ZAMAN, MAKAN, IKHWAN (RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT PEOPLE).

Idries Shah

#6. The Book of Wisdom. Simab said: 'I shall sell the Book of Wisdom for a hundred gold pieces, and some people will say that it is cheap.' Yunus Marmar said to him: 'And I shall give away the key to understanding it, and almost none shall take it, even free of charge.

Idries Shah

#7. Sufism is education, in that it has a body of knowledge which it transmits to those who have not got it.

Idries Shah

#8. You can learn more in half an hour's direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of formal effort.

Idries Shah

#9. If you do not understand, you cannot love. You can only imagine that you love.

Idries Shah

#10. The secret protects itself. It is found only in the spirit and practice of the Work.

Idries Shah

#11. Understanding and knowledge are completely different sensations in the realm of Truth than they are in the realm of society.

Idries Shah

#12. Imagination blocks you like a bolt on a door. Burn that bar. (Rumi)

Idries Shah

#13. Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.

Idries Shah

#14. None meets harm who knows his capacity.

Idries Shah

#15. It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.

Idries Shah

#16. Sufism is the doing in this lifetime what any fool will be doing in then thousand years' time.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#18. The worst of sages is a visitor of princes; the best of princes is a visitor of sages.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#20. Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#22. A donkey eats a melon, it remains a donkey

Idries Shah

#23. Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.

Idries Shah

#24. Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.

Idries Shah

#25. A MOTTO OF THE HUMAN RACE
Tell me what to do; but it must be what I want you to tell me.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#27. The happiness of the superficial: when a man who has lost his donkey finds it again.

Idries Shah

#28. What goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.

Idries Shah

#29. The sort of man who, throwing a stone upon the ground, would miss.

Idries Shah

#30. Love was supposed to be the easiest path to divinity

Soroosh Shahrivar

#31. Only the search for truth is valid, the desire for wisdom the motive. The method is assimilation, not study.

Idries Shah

#32. Whoever gives knowledge to a fool loses it
And who keeps it from the deserving does wrong.

Idries Shah

#33. Knowledge gives nothing to a man until he gives everything to it.

Idries Shah

#34. Words, they say, are the food of minds. But, like other foods, they can do little by themselves.

Idries Shah

#35. The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.

Idries Shah

#36. Knowledge cannot be attained except through humility.

Idries Shah

#37. It is experience which teaches, not controversy based on supposed logic and assumptions of what is likely to be true.

Idries Shah

#38. Nothing can defile the Sufi, and he in fact purifies everything." Abu-Turab al-Nakhsabi.

Idries Shah

#39. In a village where everyone has only one leg, the biped will hop about more lamely than anyone else, if he knows what is good for him.

Idries Shah

#40. Rust through washing never became white.

Idries Shah

#41. You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.

Idries Shah

#42. Haste is from the Devil.

Idries Shah

#43. Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.

Idries Shah

#44. 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

#45. It is necessary to note," says Rumi, "that opposite things work together, even though nominally opposed" (Fihi Ma Fihi).

Idries Shah

#46. Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.

Idries Shah

#47. The definition of the word 'finished' is: 'This word means finished.

Idries Shah

#48. One day we will all wear a garment which has no pockets ...

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#50. Sufism is that which succeeds in bringing to man the High Knowledge.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#52. Truth has no form.

Idries Shah

#53. 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

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

Idries Shah

#55. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#58. 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

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

Idries Shah

#60. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#69. 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

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

Idries Shah

#71. 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

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#77. Religion, for instance, cannot be accepted or rejected out of hand, until the student knows exactly what religion means.

Idries Shah

#78. To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.

Idries Shah

#79. 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

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

Idries Shah

#81. Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.

Idries Shah

#82. 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

#83. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Truthful man:
He who is, secretly, regarded by everyone as an enemy.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#87. Sufism is known by means of itself.

Idries Shah

#88. 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

#89. No colour comes after black.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#98. The liar has a bad memory.

Idries Shah

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

Idries Shah

#100. Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition

Idries Shah