Idries Shah Quotes
When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.
Quotes to Explore
-
The desire is thy prayers; and if thy desire is without ceasing, thy prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.
-
Dance and I are synonymous, and nobody can take away dance from my life. Also, I cannot look at dance in an inert way; it's my passion, and I get keen on being part of any show or film that has dance!
-
With the price of life these days, you've got to get everything for free you can.
-
We're supposed to be an example of freedom, and if we are doing things that are injustice to people, then what is our statement?
-
People in love don't see gender, colour or religion. Or age. It's about the other person, the one that you love and who loves you. You don't think of them in terms of a label. You just go with your heart.
-
We need more children raised in the optimum situation, which is between a mom and a dad bonded together for life.
-
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
-
It's fun to look at people that are so good at acting that aren't actors, like David Bowie creating a mystique about rock n' roll.
-
If there are negative people around me, I just try to distance myself from that.
-
I'm half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It's best not to ask questions and just enjoy.
-
Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece's new finance minister, I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand. Nothing could be further from the truth.
-
The best thing about being on the road in general is just playing every single night in front of people that are genuinely fans of your music.
-
I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.
-
I was amazed at the support that I got when I was in there. And when I came out people knew that I was back on track. I was interested in working again.
-
Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
-
The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.
-
People assume that because I'm a great athlete, I can dance. But no. My rhythm is off a little bit.
-
There are no 'political prisoners' as such in Bahrain. People are not arrested because they express their views, we only have criminals.
-
The best way to judge a life is to ask yourself, "Did I make the best use of the time I had?
-
I'm a Midwesterner! Not being able to have a cheeseburger once in a while would be torture!
-
We cannot do everything in Africa, but doing nothing is not an option.
-
All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds.
-
I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
-
When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.
