Quotes About Sufis

The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.

The Sufis, ' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds

Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl

Sufis were always spreading love with their music, and if some kind of extremism is a threat to it, it is a threat to all humanity.

Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

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

Who anyway can define the borderline between gnosis and poetic knowledge? The two modes are not identical, and yet they interpenetrate one another. Are we to call the gnosis of Novalis, Blake, and Shelley a knowledge that is not poetic? In domesticating the Sufis in our imagination, Corbin renders Ibn 1 Arabi and Suhrawardi as a Blakl· and a Shelley whose precursor is not Milton but the Koran.

Geometrically speaking, the Intellect is a ray rather than a circle, it emanates from God rather than reflecting Him. "Allah is known to Himself alone" say the Sufis; this saying, while it apparently excludes man from a direct and total knowledge, in reality enunciates the essential and mysterious divinity of pure Intellect; formulae of this kind are only fully understandable in the light of the often quoted hadith: "He who knows his soul knows his Lord.

If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence:

Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

The practice of the Sufis is too sublime to have a formal beginning,

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.

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

The blackness of night is an essential quality of the Divine Feminine. The "black cloak" of Muhammad is very famous. The Sûfîs sing about kali kamaliya vala (the one wrapped in the black blanket) in their qawwalis (spiritual songs). Muhammad's prayer rug was also black, as was the first flag of Islam.

Sufis acknowledge that in each generation there is a being known as the Qutub, or Axial Centrality, the Spiritual 'Pole' of the Age.

All praise is due to Allah. Allah is the One Reality, and that Reality is Love. We humans are love returning to Love. Sufis have taught great wisdom to humanity regarding the clearest ways to make that "return." The finest way is through remembering (dhikr) Allah at all times, and knowing that Allah alone exists.

As we know, bears hibernate in caves. They appear almost lifeless. This is an analog to the practices of ancient shamans, and to Sufis who practice the forty-day halvet (retreat), in which the Shaman would enter a cave, have an experience of dying, explore the spiritual realms, and then is reborn as the Initiate or Master (just as the bear is reborn each spring as it "wakes up" and leaves its cave).

Bees are a recurring symbol of the Merovingians and the humming or buzzing sound of bees is likened to supersensible "sounds" experienced by many Sufis as they enter spirit realms.

The life absolute from which has sprung all that is felt, seen, and perceived, and into which all again merges in time, is a silent, motionless and eternal life which among the Sufis is called Zat. Every motion that springs forth from this silent life is a vibration and a creator of vibrations. Within one vibration are created many vibrations.

Die Sufis sagen, "die Kaaba, der heilige Ort, das Paradies ist das Herz des Menschen." Deswegen respektieren sie jedes Herz. Jedes Herz ist ihre Kaaba, ihr Heiligtum. Sie verbeugen sich vor dem Menschenherzen, denn in diesem Herzen lebt Gott. (S. 240)

Guidance," says Ibn Arabi, "is to be led to bewilderment. Then you will know that the whole affair is bewilderment, that bewilderment is agitation and movement, and movement is life. There is no rest, no death, only existence, nothing of nonexistence."55 So it continues for all eternity. In reality, it is this bewilderment that allows the Sufis to taste already in this world the never-ending bliss of paradise.

Dance with the sufis, celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain.

There was also more practical inquiry. How should I make a living? How do I get my relatives out of my house? Could you help me postpone payment of this loan? The dervishes had jobs in the workday world: mason, weaver, bookbinder, grocer, hatmaker, tailor, carpenter. They were craftsmen and -women, not renunciates of everyday life, but affirmative makers and ecstatics. Some people call them sufis, or mystics. I say they're on the way of the heart.