Idries Shah Quotes - Page 3

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

If you cannot laugh frequently and genuinely, you have no soul.

A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

All forms are limited. Some of the limitations are time, place, culture, language.

They say: 'Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose the strength without gaining wisdom.

You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.

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

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.

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.

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.

… when we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief.

These lecture provide material for the consideration of common factors, in theory and in development, from the viewpoint of the idea of surrender to the Divine Will, reviewing some aspects of the interplay between Christians and Moslems, and introducing material from and about Sufis.

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

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

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.

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

It is not always a question of the Emperor having no clothes on. Sometimes it is, 'Is that an Emperor at all?

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.

I have heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.
You ask me what to do about them.
It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race.
Face that one first.

There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.