Idries Shah
Author
1924-06-16 – 1996-01-01
Quotes by Idries Shah
-
Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Read quote -
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Read quote -
Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
Read quote -
To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.
Read quote -
Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained
Read quote -
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Read quote -
People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.
Read quote -
Our heads are filled with —knowledge', a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Read quote -
There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.
Read quote -
EXPECTATION If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.
Read quote -
Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.
Read quote -
Most of the supposedly Sufi organizations, exercises and —orders— are in fact only of archaeological interest.
Read quote -
The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.
Read quote -
Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.
Read quote -
People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Read quote -
The process of learning is the process of discovering what really exists.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.
Read quote -
The happiness of the superficial: when a man who has lost his donkey finds it again.
Read quote -
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
Read quote