Sufi Quotes - Page 2

Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.

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.

Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.

The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.

Remedy
Your medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.

Hazrat Ali

Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.

Real generosity is anonymous to the extent that a man should be prepared even to be considered ungenerous rather than explain it to others.

The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.

He who knows himself, knows his Lord' means, among other things, that self-deception prevents knowledge.

Study institutions may become visible when the head is more emptied of imaginings.

Words have to die if humans are to live.

To copy a virtue in another is more copying than it is virtue. Try to learn what that virtue is based upon.

Do not try to be humble: learn humility.

If you seek a teacher, try to become a real student. If you want to be a student, try to find a real teacher.

The man who knows must discharge a function. The one who does not, cannot arrogate one to himself; he can only try to do so.

If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.

Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?

One cannot learn from someone whom one distrusts.

The Sufis are unanimous that a Guide (Sheikh) is absolutely essential, though never available on demand: 'the Sufis are not merchants'.

If the path has been laid down, why the successive appearance of different teachers? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel, if everything were as cosy and sequential as primitive longing so easily convinces us?