Quotes by Teachers - Page 20

Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Idries Shah
Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over duration that were previously unimaginable. Unlike personal or communal value, public value requires not just new opportunities for old motivations; it requires governance, which is to say ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group.
Clay Shirky
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
[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.
Clay Shirky
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.
Clay Shirky
[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
Clay Shirky
[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
Clay Shirky
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
Clay Shirky
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
Clay Shirky
When we change the way we communicate, we change society
Clay Shirky
The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.
Marjorie Hudson
If you're a ghost," he said, "we mean you no disrespect. And if you're not a ghost, tell me who you are-or you soon will be one
John Flanagan
Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That was no way to advance an academic career. She didn’t want to be an instrument of justice. She just wanted to do some literary research and earn a living.
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk
Joseph Zobel
Each time I discovered a potential link between one character’s story and another’s, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.
Richard Scarsbrook
Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.
James Van Pelt
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
David Malouf
That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
Wally Lamb
The simplest toy, one which even the youngest child can operate, is called a grandparent.
Sam Levenson
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
Wally Lamb
Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing — what does that remind you of? Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results? Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.
Margaret Edson
It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table.
Oswald Chambers
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
John Taylor Gatto
I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
Frank McCourt
They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.
John McGahern
Something in the air this morning made me feel like flying. . . "Spring Flight
Eileen Granfors
There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.
Oswald Chambers
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
Later she came to realise that under one reality there’s always another. And another one under that.
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
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
Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.
Oswald Chambers
Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.
Mariama Bâ
Saying of the ProphetDesireDesire not the world, and God will love you. Desire not what others have, and they will love you.
Idries Shah
Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.
Oswald Chambers
The cosmos does not require God, Laplace said to himself. But Emperors require Him. All those who seek to subjugate human beings in one form or another require Him. Science does not need God.
Tomichan Matheikal
Any fool with ambition and heartlessness can be a ruler.
Tomichan Matheikal
Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind.
Idries Shah
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