Quotes by British Authors - Page 524

What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetEnvyEnvy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetThe JudgeA man appointed to be a judge has been killed without a knife.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetAngerYou ask for a piece of advice. I tell you: 'Do not get angry.' He is strong who can withhold anger.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetThe TongueA man slips with his tongue more than with his feet.
Idries Shah
The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.
Hannah Fry
Poor greedy one, wherever he runs He's after food, and death is after him.(Saadi)
Idries Shah
Patience is a garment which has never worn out.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetUnderstandingSpeak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.
Idries Shah
If you have no troubles – buy a goat.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza. Worry: Something to make you unnecessarily ill.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPoverty: The result of marriage.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPenitent: Someone who has been made incapable of enjoying himself.
Idries Shah
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
The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.
Malcolm Gladwell
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
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.
Idries Shah
It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they", the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.
Friedrich A. Hayek
...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.
D.W. Winnicott
The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.
Israel M. Kirzner
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
If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.
Neel Burton
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
There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
Alain de Botton
Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. “The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.
Idries Shah
The bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Stephen Grosz
among roses, be a rose, among thorns, be a thorn
Idries Shah
For every Pharoah there is a Moses.
Idries Shah
They had an ugly look to one as prone to disgust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me.
Charles Dickens
Tthe thing is, Dr. Foster…the truth is, I like Marina.” He eyed the doctor. “And I actually don’t like you very much.”Oh, it was worth it. God, it was worth it. To see the perennially calm face turn pale, only slightly, but still pale; to see him blink away the hurt in his watery, pallid blue eyes.
Amelia Mangan
The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, "Shit happens", which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways.
Bruce Hood
I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Jon Ronson
Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.
Idries Shah
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.
Nathan Filer
If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.
Nathan Filer
However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.
Adam Phillips
The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.
John Cleese
Saadi: Be a true renouncer, (zahid) and [you can even] ware satin.
Idries Shah
What then am I? In the end, all we have is simply what we find, and what we can usefully say to each other about what we find is all that needs to be said. And perhaps, in the end, it's best just to sit quietly and let go of that thought too.
Murray Shanahan
In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.
Alan W. Watts
Humility has to precede instruction.
Idries Shah
The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.
Neel Burton
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.
Dylan Evans