Idries Shah Quotes - Page 6

Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.

Knowledge gives nothing to a man until he gives everything to it.

None should say : 'I can trust,' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.

Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience it and you will know'.

The power of Allah: no sound, no shape, no form. But when it manifests, none can resist it.

Saying of the ProphetMonkishnessNo monkery in Islam.

Sufism is experiential. Capacities, even those for learning beyond a certain point, are provoked by Sufis, by one's own efforts and what results from them, and by an element of what is referred to by Sufis as the Divine.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaDrugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.

The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition.

Truth has no form.

Why did I do such-and-such a thing?' is all very well. But what about 'How otherwise could I have done it?'.

Dye your hair, certainly. But what can you do for your face?

Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.

Remember that greed includes greed for being not greedy.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction.

Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.

Nothing cheap without reason.

Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.

Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why is has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'.

Religion, for instance, cannot be accepted or rejected out of hand, until the student knows exactly what religion means.

People used to play with toys.Now the toys play with them.

If the path has been laid down, why the successive appearance of different teachers? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel, if everything were as cosy and sequential as primitive longing so easily convinces us?

I ask about the sky, but the answer is about a rope.

RemedyYour medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.Hazrat Ali

From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths – outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone.

The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.

If you want to be a calligrapher, write, and write, and write.

A Sufi has a right to be served, but he has no right to demand. Maruf Karkhi of Khorasan

Definition of a SufiTo learn, people must give up a great deal, and this includes ritual as something from which they imagine they might learn. It is to emphasise this that Abu-Yaqub al-Susi, quoted in Kalabadhi's Taaruf, states that 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.

Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.

It will pass, whatever it is.

Saying of the ProphetSleepSleep is the brother of death.

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.

Do not try to be humble: learn humility.

However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can’t run away from your own feet.

Saying of the ProphetLoveDo you think you love your Creator? Love your fellow-creature first.

Laziness - The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.

Sufis are not here to satisfy a demand. They exist to share what they have got. These two things are not always the same.

There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.

It is not Sufism if it does not perform its function for you. A cloak is no longer a cloak if it does not keep a man warm.

Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained

Saying of the ProphetInk and BloodThe ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr.

Counsels of BahaudinYou want to be filled. But something which is full has first to be emptied. Empty yourself so that you will fill properly, by observing these counsels, which you can do as duties to yourself:FirstNever follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.

Of whom can we think well when it is believed that if nothing bad is done to you, this has been a kindness?

The donkey which brought you to this door must be dismissed if you want to get through it’.

Everyone does not know the secrets of TruthThe States of Truth are not evidential.

Day and NightThe night is long: do not shorten it by sleep. The day is fair: do not darken it with wrongdoing.

The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying. It was: 'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?

You are still adrift while you still think that a means is an end.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPoverty: The result of marriage.

The important place held by Jesus among the world's six hundred million Moslems... and the agreement of both religions about the necessity for surrender to God as the means of salvation, thus makes it comparatively easy for a Moslem to address himself to Christians: the sympathy and the history are already there.

Fettered feet in the presence of friends is better than living in a garden with strangers.

The fruit of timidity is neither gain nor loss.

Whoever knows God, does not (any longer) say “God”.

Do not dwell upon whether you will put yourself into the hands of a teacher. You are always in his hands.

If a pot can multiply. One day Nasrudin lent his cooking pots to a neighbour, who was giving a feast. The neighbour returned them, together with one extra one – a very tiny pot. 'What is this?' asked Nasrudin. 'According to law, I have given you the offspring of your property which was born when the pots were in my care,' said the joker. Shortly afterwards Nasrudin borrowed his neighbour's pots, but did not return them. The man came round to get them back. 'Alas!' said Nasrudin, 'they are dead. We have established, have we not, that pots are mortal?'.

it was being written in the East that 'Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality'.

SAYING OF SHEIKH ZIAUDIN:Self-justification is worse than the original offence.

Water shrinks wool, urgency shrinks time.Shrinkage may be an advantage or the reverse, according to expectation.

THE BIRD AND THE WATERA bird which has not heard of fresh waterDips his beak in salt-water year after year.(Anwar-i-Suhaili)