Idries Shah

"Sufis hold that the superior experience and knowledge comes to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth,capacity,and earning of it."

"Only the search for truth is valid, the desire for wisdom the motive. The method is assimilation, not study."

"Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza Drugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant."

"Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them."

"However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can’t run away from your own feet."

"Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact."

"Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought."

"People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs."

"The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds"

"If I knew what two and two were – I would say Four!"

"Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition."

"You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous."

"People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge."

"The decline in the influence of religion has been due, in the main, not to religion itself, but to the very shallowness of many practitioners. People who are indoctrinated and mistake implanted obsession for faith, are themselves destroyers of the very thing which they imagine themselves called upon to try to protect. In fact, of course, they have no such call: and their capacity to protect something which is other than their imaginings makes for a comical situation."