Idries Shah Quotes - Page 8

Because sugar is not arsenic, many graves are full.
Idries Shah
Patience is bitter, but bears a sweet fruit.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaWisdom: Something you can learn without knowing it.
Idries Shah
Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt.
Idries Shah
How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body?
Idries Shah
The door of illumination is open to those for whom other doors are closed.
Idries Shah
A man must be a Salomon before his magical ring will work
Idries Shah
The process of learning is the process of discovering what really exists.
Idries Shah
He discards a quilt for fear of bugs.
Idries Shah
To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.
Idries Shah
The happiness of the superficial: when a man who has lost his donkey finds it again.
Idries Shah
In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.
Idries Shah
The liar has a bad memory.
Idries Shah
There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.
Idries Shah
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
EXPECTATION If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.
Idries Shah
Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.
Idries Shah
A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.
Idries Shah
Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. “The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.
Idries Shah
among roses, be a rose, among thorns, be a thorn
Idries Shah
For every Pharoah there is a Moses.
Idries Shah
Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
Saadi: Be a true renouncer, (zahid) and [you can even] ware satin.
Idries Shah
Humility has to precede instruction.
Idries Shah
Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.
Idries Shah
The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.
Idries Shah
I am an idol worshipper; for I understand what idol worship means, and the idolater does not.
Idries Shah
Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.
Idries Shah
It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.
Idries Shah
People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Idries Shah
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
Idries Shah
Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.
Idries Shah
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
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Idries Shah
The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.
Idries Shah
Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Idries Shah
Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
Idries Shah
People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Idries Shah
Presence and AbsenceA certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
Idries Shah
Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Idries Shah
Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained
Idries Shah
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
You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.
Idries Shah
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.
Idries Shah
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Idries Shah
Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.
Idries Shah
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.
Idries Shah
Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Idries Shah
From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.
Idries Shah
Causes: As important a fact as any individual cause on earth is the vital incapacity of the human individual to distinguish between genuine cause and one which is foisted upon him by pressure, environment, propaganda, conditioning.If people had the sense they pretend to have, they would seek this fundamental distinction perceptible.Hardly anyone makes this effort. This is partly because it is an invisible but powerful part of their culture to teach that conditioned emotionality and ‘causes’ whose necessity, urgency or rightness is only conditioned into them, are necessarily, right.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaAdherent:Someone who will believe anything except what he should.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaSupporter: Someone who will say anything.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaBribetSubstitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.
Idries Shah
Be a dog, but don't be a younger brother.Proverb.
Idries Shah
Inheritance and culture obscure people’s higher capacities.
Idries Shah
Almost every day I am reminded of Saadi's reflection that there is no senseless tyranny like that of subordinates.
Idries Shah
Ali, Son of the Father of the SeekerAli said: 'None may arrive at the Truth until he is able to think that the Path itself may be wrong. This is because those who can only believe that it must be right are not believers, but people who are incapable of thinking otherwise than they already think. Such people are not men at all. Like animals they must follow certain beliefs, and during this time they cannot learn. Because they cannot be called “humanity”, they cannot arrive at the Truth.
Idries Shah