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

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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
Instrument
Instruments
Remain
Becomes
Belief
Learn
Lost
Really

More quotes by Idries Shah

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You are adrift while you still think that a means is an end.
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Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
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When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.
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The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
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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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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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The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.
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Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
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To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.
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When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
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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.
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The impatient man is his own enemy he slams the door on his own progress.
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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.
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If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!
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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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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.
Idries Shah
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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.
Idries Shah
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People used to play with toys. Now the toys play with them.
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.
Idries Shah
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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.
Idries Shah