Idries Shah Quotes
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Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
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When tomorrow comes, think tomorrow's thoughts.
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A 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.
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When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
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Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.
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A man who believes the word of a donkey in preference to my word does not deserve to be lent anything.
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We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before.
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The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
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The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.
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History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
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The learned person who only talks will never Penetrate to the inner heart of humans.
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Knowledge is something which you can use. Belief is something which uses you.
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The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.
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Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.
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A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions.
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Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature
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Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.
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There is a Persian proverb: 'To test that which has been tested is ignorance.' To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse.
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When the lion had eaten its fill, and the jackals had taken their share, the ants came along and finished up the meat from the bones of the haughty stag.
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He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah.
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The Sufi is One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.
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Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.
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Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.
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You need not wonder whether you should have an unreliable person as a friend. An unreliable person is nobody's friend.