Quote

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

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
Neither
Exercise
Approach
Means
Causing
Power
Correct
May
Damage
Mean
Cruelty
Kindness

More quotes by Idries Shah

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Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
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The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.
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The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.
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When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
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Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
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Do not try to be humble: learn humility.
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If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.
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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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The impatient man is his own enemy he slams the door on his own progress.
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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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The learned person who only talks will never Penetrate to the inner heart of humans.
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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.
Idries Shah
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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.
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Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
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When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.
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Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.
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The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge. No real knowledge is common.
Idries Shah
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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.
Idries Shah
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Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
Idries Shah
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The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
Idries Shah