Idries Shah Quotes

They asked Abboud of Omdurman: 'Which is better, to be young or to be old?' He said: 'To be old is to have less time before you and more mistakes behind. I leave you to decide whether this is better than the reverse.

~ Idries Shah

It is no accident that Sufis find that they can connect most constructively with people who are well integrated into the world, as well as having higher aims, and that those who adopt a sensible attitude towards society and life as generally known can usually absorb Sufi teachings very well indeed

~ Idries Shah

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.

~ Idries Shah

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.

~ Idries Shah

Show a man too many camels' bones, or show them to him too often, and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one. (Mirza Ahsan of Tabriz)

~ Idries Shah

Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the veils which have to be dissolved in the mind.

~ Idries Shah

Saying of the ProphetDesireDesire not the world, and God will love you. Desire not what others have, and they will love you.

~ Idries Shah

Two people can illustrate crudity to you.The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.

~ Idries Shah

The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.

~ Idries Shah

Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets, many who are in their graves are in reality alive.

~ Idries Shah

The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds

~ Idries Shah

When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.

~ Idries Shah

Ali, Son of the Father of the SeekerAli said: 'None may arrive at the Truth until he is able to think that the Path itself may be wrong. This is because those who can only believe that it must be right are not believers, but people who are incapable of thinking otherwise than they already think. Such people are not men at all. Like animals they must follow certain beliefs, and during this time they cannot learn. Because they cannot be called “humanity”, they cannot arrive at the Truth.

~ Idries Shah

Almost every day I am reminded of Saadi's reflection that there is no senseless tyranny like that of subordinates.

~ Idries Shah

Inheritance and culture obscure people’s higher capacities.

~ Idries Shah

Be a dog, but don't be a younger brother.Proverb.

~ Idries Shah

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaBribe Substitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.

~ Idries Shah

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaSupporter: Someone who will say anything.

~ Idries Shah

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaAdherent:Someone who will believe anything except what he should.

~ Idries Shah

Causes: As important a fact as any individual cause on earth is the vital incapacity of the human individual to distinguish between genuine cause and one which is foisted upon him by pressure, environment, propaganda, conditioning.If people had the sense they pretend to have, they would seek this fundamental distinction perceptible.Hardly anyone makes this effort. This is partly because it is an invisible but powerful part of their culture to teach that conditioned emotionality and ‘causes’ whose necessity, urgency or rightness is only conditioned into them, are necessarily, right.

~ Idries Shah

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.

~ Idries Shah

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.

~ Idries Shah

From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.

~ Idries Shah

Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.

~ Idries Shah

Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.

~ Idries Shah

Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.

~ Idries Shah

...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.

~ Idries Shah

Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.

~ Idries Shah

You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.

~ Idries Shah

Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?

~ Idries Shah

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

~ Idries Shah

Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.

~ Idries Shah

Presence and AbsenceA 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.

~ Idries Shah

People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.

~ Idries Shah

Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.

~ Idries Shah

Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.

~ Idries Shah

The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.

~ Idries Shah

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

~ Idries Shah

Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

~ Idries Shah

Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.

~ Idries Shah