Quotes from Idries Shah

One lie will keep out forty truths.

Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.

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

Abu-Yaqub al-Susi: 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.

Death If he is a good man, death will be a release; If he is a bad one, it will release others from him.

Voice in the night A voice whispered to me last night: 'There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night!

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?

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

What is humanity? To feel pain at the sorrows of our neighbours, to feel humiliated at the humiliation of fellow-beings.

If you cannot laugh frequently and genuinely, you have no soul.

Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets; many who are in their graves are in reality alive.

Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

Learning without action is like wax without honey. (Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Even if false gold makes a man happy: At the mint it will be identified.

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.

Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.

The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.

When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.

If you are penniless you will have a thousand dreams. Get even a single piece of money, however, and you will have only twenty options.

Sandals. The Sufi teacher Ghulam-Shah was asked what pattern he used in formulating his courses for disciples. He said: 'Barefoot until you can get sandals, sandals until you can manage boots.

The real generosity is when a man does something generous when nobody knows about it.

Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do.

Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.

It is not Sufism if it does not perform its function for you. A cloak is no longer a cloak if it does not keep a man warm.