Quotes from Idries Shah

Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.

Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.

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

A motto of the human race: Let me do as I like, and give me approval as well.

Sayings of the Prophet Trust: Trust in God – but tie your camel first.

The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.

Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.

Good. Show me a man who thinks that he knows what 'good' is, and I will probably be able to show you a horror of a person. Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.

The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.

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?

If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.

One cannot learn from someone whom one distrusts.

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!

It is not important to have said a thing first, or best - or even most interestingly. What is important is to say it on the right occasion.

A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions.

You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.