Quotes from Idries Shah

Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.

Angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of man

People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.

Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.

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

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaDrugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.

Sufis hold that the superior experience and knowledge comes to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth, capacity, and earning of it.

When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration.

Understanding and knowledge are completely different sensations in the realm of Truth than they are in the realm of society.

If the father cannot, the son will finish the task.

THE BIRD AND THE WATERA bird which has not heard of fresh waterDips his beak in salt-water year after year.(Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Knowledge. How curious that a man who closes his hand upon air so often thinks that he has a ruby within his grasp.

No surgeon can treat the wounds of the tongue.

None meets harm who knows his capacity.

Now that I have found thee, I know that in the first step I took, I moved away from thee.

Hazrat Ali, in a saying attributed to him, says: 'Man is in disguise, covered by his tongue'.

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

Better to quarrel with a friend than to support enemies.

The mine is always bigger than the gem.

Whoever gives knowledge to a fool loses itAnd who keeps it from the deserving does wrong.

Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience and you will know'.

The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is "not" in their destiny.

The impatient man is his own enemy; he slams the door on his own progress.

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.