Quotes from Idries Shah

No surgeon can treat the wounds of the tongue.

The Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.

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

Talent is the presence of ability and absence of understanding about the source and operation of knowledge.

I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages. Rabia

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza A fool: A man trying to be honest with the dishonest.

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

If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.

If you are uninterested in what I say, there's an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say, and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what formed your attitude?

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.

You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.

Do not tell your secrets to everyone in this headquarters, Earth. We have surveyed it well. There was nobody to whom to entrust secrets.

Not to be greedy is, paradoxically, the highest form of looking after one's true interests.

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

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.

When humility is exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were, exist at all.

Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible.

Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.

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

SAYING OF SHEIKH ZIAUDIN: Self-justification is worse than the original offence.

Remember the proverb: 'A sign is enough for the alert, but a thousand counsels are not enough for the negligent.

You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.

Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them.

Saying of the Prophet Oppression When oppression exists, even the bird dies in its nest.