Quotes by Sufis - Page 9

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
When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
Idries Shah
The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds
Idries Shah
The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.
Idries Shah
Two people can illustrate crudity to you.The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.
Idries Shah
Saying of the ProphetDesireDesire not the world, and God will love you. Desire not what others have, and they will love you.
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Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind.
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There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.
Idries Shah
Show a man too many camels' bones, or show them to him too often, and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one. (Mirza Ahsan of Tabriz)
Idries Shah
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
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
The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.
Idries Shah
If I knew what two and two were – I would say Four!
Idries Shah
Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.
Idries Shah
Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
Idries Shah
The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.
Idries Shah
If you seek small things to do, and do them well, great things will seek you, and demand to be performed.
Idries Shah
Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
Idries Shah
Show a man too many camels' bones,or show them to him too often,and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one.
Idries Shah
It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.
Idries Shah
The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.
Idries Shah
Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.
Idries Shah
There is a saying that, according to what a person's mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.
Idries Shah
Remember that greed includes greed for being not greedy.
Idries Shah
The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.
Idries Shah
Saadi’s dictum, in the Bostan: ‘The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe
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You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
Patience is the food of understanding.
Idries Shah
People who cannot trust are themselves not trustworthy, and therefore cannot be entrusted with important things.
Idries Shah
You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaIntellectual: One who knows no craft.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaEmotionalist:A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.
Idries Shah
When the mind is full of established biases, it will not be able to graft Sufism on top of them.
Idries Shah
Words, they say, are the food of minds. But, like other foods, they can do little by themselves.
Idries Shah