Idries Shah Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

If you give what can be taken, you are not really giving. Take what you are given, not what you want to be given. Give what cannot be taken.

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

Idries Shah
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

Idries Shah
The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.

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

Idries Shah
Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.

Idries Shah
The chicken had his wish, and was magically transformed into a fox. Then he found that he could not digest grain.

Idries Shah
The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying.
It was:
'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?

Idries Shah
There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.

Idries Shah
Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken.

Idries Shah
But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.

Idries Shah
When we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief.

Idries Shah
When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.

Idries Shah
The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Idries Shah
If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.

Idries Shah
Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes.

Idries Shah
None should say: 'I can trust' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.

Idries Shah
The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured'.

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

Idries Shah
When the lion had eaten its fill, and the jackals had taken their share, the ants came along and finished up the meat from the bones of the haughty stag.

Idries Shah
When Fortune knocks, open the door,' they say. But why should one make fortune knock, by keeping the door shut?

Idries Shah
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?

Idries Shah
People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

Idries Shah
From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths – outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone.

Idries Shah
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.

Idries Shah
He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah.

Idries Shah
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.

Idries Shah
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.

Idries Shah
Finding I could speak the language of ants, I approached one and inquired, "What is God like? Does he resemble the ant?"

Idries Shah
One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.

Idries Shah