Idries Shah Quotes
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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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People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
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Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.
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If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!
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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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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.
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The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying. It was: 'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?
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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.
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Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.
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Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind.
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To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.
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If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.
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The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service
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If you can turn a murderer into a mere thief, you are making progress.
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The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.
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From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying: 'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.
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A real secret is something which only one person knows.
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Meditation - Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be.
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Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
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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.
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Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
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The more wakeful a man is to the things which surround him, the more asleep is he, and his waking is worse than his sleep.
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Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
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It is not enough that there is a collection of people with the common aim of working in unison towards an objective... Aspiration and desire only are not enough.