Idries Shah

“People talk about ‘service, effort, love, knowledge’. But with knowledge you know what love is, and what it is not.”

“If you seek small things to do, and do them well, great things will seek you, and demand to be performed.”

“Correct teaching brings out human excellence.”

“Trying to force something is the best way to stop it from happening.”

“Deteriorated science is a cult, so is imitative or deteriorated Sufism.”

“The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate.”

“Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.”

“When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.”

“The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.”

“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.”

“Saadi: Be a true renouncer, (zahid) and [you can even] ware satin.”

“You can learn more in half an hour's direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of formal effort.”

“Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.”

“among roses, be a rose, among thorns, be a thorn”

“Haste is from the Devil.”

“Sufi secrets are perceived, not understood by words.”

“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?”

“When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.”

“Saadi’s dictum, in the Bostan: ‘The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe”

“What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.”