Sufis Quotes

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

~ 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

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

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

People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

~ Idries Shah

The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.

~ Idries Shah

It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.

~ Idries Shah

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

~ Idries Shah

A MOTTO OF THE HUMAN RACETell me what to do, but it must be what I want you to tell me.

~ Idries Shah

I am an idol worshipper; for I understand what idol worship means, and the idolater does not.

~ Idries Shah

The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.

~ Idries Shah

Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.

~ Idries Shah

Humility has to precede instruction.

~ Idries Shah