Idries Shah Quotes
If you give what can be taken, you are not really giving. Take what you are given, not what you want to be given. Give what cannot be taken.
The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge. No real knowledge is common.
No practice exists in isolation.
Do not try to be humble: learn humility.
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.
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!
History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
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.
From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying: 'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.
But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.
When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.
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.
When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.
Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
The human being, whether he realises it or not, is trusting someone or something every moment of the day.
Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.
Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them.
None should say: 'I can trust' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken.
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.
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.
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.
A man who believes the word of a donkey in preference to my word does not deserve to be lent anything.
Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.
I am the Real, for I have not ceased to be real – through the Real.
A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.
BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL.
Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do. Saadi teaches: ‘when the generous promise, they perform
Until you can understand illogicality, and the meaningfulness of it, shun the Sufis except for limited, precise, self-evident services.
Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.
Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.