Quotes by Teachers - Page 21

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
Idries Shah
You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
What the mind forgetsThe scars keep remembering
Edith L. Tiempo
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
A donkey eats a melon, it remains a donkey
Idries Shah
Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.
Natalie Goldberg
A man's capacity is the same as his breadth of vision.
Idries Shah
I don't think there is anything like the awareness of space to process emotion. That space is such an incredible processor. There is no analysis equal to the processing capacity of open awareness. When you are trying to analyze something, you don't realize that the analyzer itself is part of the problem. Both the problem and the analyzer are constructions of the mind. But direct, open, naked awareness is not a construction of the mind but the nature of the mind itself, and therefore the greatest processor ever.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind.
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
Frank McCourt
Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?
Wally Lamb
There are certain things we owe our little sisters.
Claire Hennessy
What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.
P.C. Cast
The priesthood of Christ is “not according to the law of a fleshy commandment, but according to the power of an indestructible life” (Heb. 7:16). Aaron was constituted high priest according to the powerless letter of the law, but Christ according to the powerful element of an indestructible life. Our High Priest is constituted of a life which nothing can conquer, but which rather conquers everything! It is a life which cannot be destroyed. A life which saves to the uttermost. The endless, eternal, divine, uncreated life. The resurrection life which has passed the test of death and Hades.
Witness Lee
The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.
Oswald Chambers
A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.
Oswald Chambers
Then your heart is a black, shriveled thing, because you absolutely betray me.
P.C. Cast
The secret of true prosperity is finding our security through our connection with the divine, with the spiritual world.
Christopher Penczak
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland
I ask to be made beautiful like the trees are beautiful, each growing according to a unique plan. Lop off a limb and and the tree will accommodate it's loss, still growing and still beautiful. It is my hope to be able to flourish in a similar fashion, taking on the shape and dimensions that is intended for me.
Julia Cameron
Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza.Poverty: The result of marriage.
Idries Shah
The one trying to have the last word is rarely walking in the Word.
Hollisa Alewine
Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.
Wally Lamb
I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.
Wally Lamb
George!' [Horace] said, the relief evident in his voice. 'Are you all right?''No! I am not!' George replied with considerable spirit. 'I have a whacking great arrow stuck through my arm and it hurts like the very dickens! How could anybody be all right in those circumstances?'...'You saved my life, George,' Horace said gently...George grimaced. 'Well, if I'd known it was going to hurt like this, I wouldn't have! I would have just let them shoot you! Why do you live this way?' he demanded in a high-pitched voice. 'How can you bear it? This sort of thing is very, very painful. I always suspected that warriors are crazy. Now I know.
John Flanagan
If peace is what every government says it seeks, and peace is the yearning of every heart, why aren't we studying it and teaching it in schools?
Colman McCarthy
Flacks for both war-obsessed governments immediately blamed the other side for the deaths of the civilians.
Colman McCarthy
With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order their young to slaughter each other. Analysis -endless analysis- has been offered about the two men's tactics, as if they were coaches preparing for the Super Bowl.
Colman McCarthy
Bush spoke of another principle, that a just war must "support a just cause." In the Persian Gulf, he said, "our cause could not be more noble." What nation has ever said its war was not noble?
Colman McCarthy
Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We all wish for world peace, but world peace will never be acheived unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called 'peacekeeping forces' into areas of conflict, but peace cannot be oppossed from the outside with guns. Only by creating peace within our own mind and helping others to do the same can we hope to achieve peace in this world.
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
The planet, saved for another day, stokes upits slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarletgash that take our breath away; a world at its interminableshow of holy dying. And we go with it, the oldgatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contributionis small, adding our handsel of warm clay.
David Malouf
A poem is a ‘line’ between any two points in creation.
Charles Olson
Jesus doesn't bring anything up from the wells of human nature--He brings them down from above.
Oswald Chambers
A few blossoms float into the room. They drop like frayed yellow ribbons on the gray carpet.
Eileen Granfors
What is humanity? To feel pain at the sorrows of our neighbours, to feel humiliated at the humiliation of fellow-beings.
Idries Shah
It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.
Howard Rheingold
I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.
Bernard Beckett
History is replete with blunders written by sycophants.
Tomichan Matheikal
History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
Idries Shah
The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
My mind is in a state of constant rebellion. I believe that will always be so.
George Mallory
Right time, right place, right people equals success.Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
Idries Shah
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
Golda Meir
History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
Idries Shah