Wisdom

"You'll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you'll be able to speak out or keep your mouth shut. It's always a challenge to work out the best way to live your life, and as much as everyone tells you what to do, ultimately how you do things is up to you."

"Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning."

"When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it."

"Saying of the Mulla Nasrudin. If I survive this life without dying, I'll be surprised."

"The Book of Wisdom. Simab said: 'I shall sell the Book of Wisdom for a hundred gold pieces, and some people will say that it is cheap.' Yunus Marmar said to him: 'And I shall give away the key to understanding it, and almost none shall take it, even free of charge."

"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."

"In the modern world we are in a paradoxical situation; because although in theory man knows that he can extend his attention to something and then remove it, he very often does not do so. In many areas he does not look at something and then detach from it, and look at something else. Once he has found something to interest himself in, he cannot detach himself from it efficiently, and therefore he cannot be objective. Note that, in most if not all languages, we have words like 'objectivity' which leads people to imagine that they have it, or can easily use it. That is equivalent (in reality if not in theory) to saying 'I know the word “gold”, so I am rich."

"An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems."

"Wisdom Sufian said: 'The wisdom which is invisible but which sustains is a hundred times better than the appearance of wisdom, for that has itself to be sustained."

"As the Eastern saying, by the sage Hilali, has it, 'one person who understands is worth a hundred who merely obey a custom."

"Voice in the night A voice whispered to me last night: 'There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night!"

"The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is “not” in their destiny."

"Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience and you will know'."

"Service I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages. Rabia el-Adawia."

"Whoever gives knowledge to a fool loses it And who keeps it from the deserving does wrong."

"One lie will keep out forty truths."

"Sayings of the Prophet Trust: Trust in God – but tie your camel first."

"Truth has no form."

"Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it."

"The mine is always bigger than the gem."