Idries Shah Quotes - Page 4

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.

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

The means through which people may perceive Truth have forms; Truth has no form.

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

Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.

But the minimum human duty is to serve others: it is no great attainment.

Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.

The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.

An egocentric pessimist is a person who thinks he hasn't changed, but that other people are behaving worse than before.

A short time in the presence of the Friends (the Sufis) is better than a hundred years’ sincere, obedient dedication.

If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!

That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in Sufism, the human soul (ruh).

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

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

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

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.

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

Because sugar is not arsenic, many graves are full.

Patience is bitter, but bears a sweet fruit.