Quote

When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.

Idries Shah

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Idries Shah
Age: 72 †
Born: 1924
Born: June 16
Died: 1996
Died: November 23
Author
Collector Of Fairy Tales
Teacher
Writer
Simla
Arkon Daraul
Instruments
Remain
Becomes
Belief
Learn
Lost
Really
Instrument

More quotes by Idries Shah

Image
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
Image
When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
Idries Shah
Image
You are adrift while you still think that a means is an end.
Idries Shah
Image
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
Image
A generous person may not have wisdom: but, unlike others, he has the means to gain it.
Idries Shah
Image
Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.
Idries Shah
Image
Do not try to be humble: learn humility.
Idries Shah
Image
But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
Idries Shah
Image
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
Image
The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
Idries Shah
Image
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
Image
If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.
Idries Shah
Image
Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the veils which have to be dissolved in the mind.
Idries Shah
Image
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
Image
To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.
Idries Shah
Image
One cannot learn from someone whom one distrusts.
Idries Shah
Image
Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
Idries Shah
Image
The impatient man is his own enemy he slams the door on his own progress.
Idries Shah
Image
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
Idries Shah
Image
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