Idries Shah, Learning How To Learn: Psychology And Spirituality In The Sufi Way Quotes
Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.
The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.
No practice exists in isolation.
Do not try to be humble: learn humility.
If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if you are unfit for it.
You have come a long way, and you do not know it. You have a long way to go, and you do know what that means.
If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
The automatism of man is overcome, in the words of Dhun'Nun, by aiming for 'being as you were, where you were, before you were'.
You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.
But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school.
Neither imagine that you are false, nor lash yourself, for both may be forms of self-indulgence.
Not to be greedy is, paradoxically, the highest form of looking after one's true interests.
There is no wisdom where there is no common sense: it cannot under those conditions find any expression.
Assume that you are part-hypocrite and part heedless, and you will not be far wrong.
If you cannot laugh frequently and genuinely, you have no soul.
If you seek a teacher, try to become a real student. If you want to be a student, try to find a real teacher.
To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction.
Study institutions may become visible when the head is more emptied of imaginings.
Words have to die if humans are to live.
I am the Real, for I have not ceased to be real – through the Real.
Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why is has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'.
Feeling important is a vice, not a virtue, however concealed as participation in something noble.
To say "yes" to the Sufi way is to say "no" to imagined escapes.
A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information....The key is the teacher.
Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.
Abu-Yaqub al-Susi: 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.
As Ibn Arabi says: ‘Absolute existence is the source of all existence’.
The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.
A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.
Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do. Saadi teaches: ‘when the generous promise, they perform
God provides the food, men provide the cooks.
Everything man needs is in the world.
The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so.
The skilled artisan uses the same iron to make a horseshoeAs he does for a polished mirror for the King.
All forms are limited. Some of the limitations are time, place, culture, language.
People who have fallacious objectives are like the barren soil. The flowers grow from soil which is composed of the right objectives.
There is a saying that, according to what a person's mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil's face.
The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.
