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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
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Idries Shah
Age: 72 †
Born: 1924
Born: June 16
Died: 1996
Died: November 23
Author
Collector Of Fairy Tales
Teacher
Writer
Simla
Arkon Daraul
Giving
Really
Taken
Given
Cannot
Give
Take
More quotes by Idries Shah
Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
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Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
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The impatient man is his own enemy he slams the door on his own progress.
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Have you noticed how many people who walk in the shade curse the Sun?
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Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.
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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.
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If you can turn a murderer into a mere thief, you are making progress.
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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
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The chicken had his wish, and was magically transformed into a fox. Then he found that he could not digest grain.
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You are adrift while you still think that a means is an end.
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When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
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Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
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If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
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The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
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None should say: 'I can trust' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
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Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.
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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.
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It is not important to have said a thing first, or best - or even most interestingly. What is important is to say it on the right occasion.
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When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
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There is a Persian proverb: 'To test that which has been tested is ignorance.' To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse.
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