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

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If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
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Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
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A generous person may not have wisdom: but, unlike others, he has the means to gain it.
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Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them.
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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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If you are uninterested in what I say, there's an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say, and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what formed your attitude?
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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.
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The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.
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Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the veils which have to be dissolved in the mind.
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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.
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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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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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The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
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Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.
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Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
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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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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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You need not wonder whether you should have an unreliable person as a friend. An unreliable person is nobody's friend.
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The impatient man is his own enemy he slams the door on his own progress.
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A man who believes the word of a donkey in preference to my word does not deserve to be lent anything.
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