Top 450 Idries Shah Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained.”

— Idries Shah

302. “There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.”

— Idries Shah

303. “There is a saying that, according to what a person’s mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil’s face.”

— Idries Shah

304. “Sufism is the essence of all religions.”

— Idries Shah

305. “Most people, whatever their opinions and protestations, do not want to learn.”

— Idries Shah

306. “I am an idol worshipper; for I understand what idol worship means, and the idolater does not.”

— Idries Shah

307. “The teacher works in accordance with the prospects of his students and the possibility of maintaining the community of Sufis.”

— Idries Shah

308. “Everything man needs is in the world.”

— Idries Shah

309. “Make mankind your dwelling place.”

— Idries Shah

310. “But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school.”

— Idries Shah

311. “El sufismo se transmite por medio del elemento humano, es decir del maestro.”

— Idries Shah

312. “No surgeon can treat the wounds of the tongue.”

— Idries Shah

313. “Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition.”

— Idries Shah

314. “Enviar un beso por mensajero.”

— Idries Shah

315. “The problem is that the spurious, the unreal, the untrue is so much easier to find that it is in danger of becoming the norm.”

— Idries Shah

316. “Charity has been made into a great virtue only because of the low level of human decency.”

— Idries Shah

317. “He is the completed Man who, from his completeness, performs, with his Mastership, the work of a slave.”

— Idries Shah

318. “You cannot learn more until you can learn more.”

— Idries Shah

319. “If you really want to learn, do not be surprised if someone tries to teach you. And do not lightly reject the method.”

— Idries Shah

320. “People generally deal with situations by means of assumptions.”

— Idries Shah

321. “A Sufi is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything.”

— Idries Shah

322. “A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information.”

— Idries Shah

323. “One day we will all wear a garment which has no pockets...”

— Idries Shah

324. “In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.”

— Idries Shah

325. “The definition of the word ‘finished’ is: ‘This word means finished.”

— Idries Shah

326. “When the mind is full of established biases, it will not be able to graft Sufism on top of them.”

— Idries Shah

327. “People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.”

— Idries Shah

328. “The teaching must, of course, work with the best part of the individual, must be directed to his or her real capacity.”

— Idries Shah

329. “What you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.”

— Idries Shah

330. “What is known to be tyranny to the superior man may appear to be justice to the ordinary one.”

— Idries Shah

331. “If you will not reprove yourself,’ Saadi says, ’you will not welcome reproof from another.”

— Idries Shah

332. “To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.”

— Idries Shah

333. “Sufism is the doing in this lifetime what any fool will be doing in then thousand years’ time.”

— Idries Shah

334. “The teacher is one who abandons ceremonial and religious display and social appearances, and concentrates on real development.”

— Idries Shah

335. “La vida: algunas veces, el hombre sobre la montura; algunas veces, la montura sobre el hombre.”

— Idries Shah

336. “Of whom can we think well when it is believed that if nothing bad is done to you, this has been a kindness?”

— Idries Shah

337. “From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.”

— Idries Shah

338. “Debating whether one trusts or not is a sign that one does not want to trust at all, and therefore is still incapable of it.”

— Idries Shah

339. “If you are covetous, you are a prisoner: If you are greedy, you will never be filled.”

— Idries Shah

340. “Generosity is also marked by doing what one says one will do.”

— Idries Shah

341. “What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.”

— Idries Shah

342. “Until you can understand illogicality, and the meaningfulness of it, shun the Sufis except for limited, precise, self-evident services.”

— Idries Shah

343. “Why did I do such-and-such a thing?′ is all very well. But what about ‘How otherwise could I have done it?”

— Idries Shah

344. “Knowledge of yourself may involve, if we are learning at the present time, a knowledge of the way of thinking of your society and to realise that you are probably its product, and that this knowledge can be attained in fact by such anthropological and psychological observations made by the Sufis in the course of their teaching how to pursue new and more promising extra perspectives.”

— Idries Shah

345. “When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration.”

— Idries Shah

346. “Haz de la humanidad tu morada.”

— Idries Shah

347. “You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.”

— Idries Shah

348. “And Rumi tells us, ‘Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue’.”

— Idries Shah

349. “People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.”

— Idries Shah

350. “Exaggeration is a standard peculiarity of man. To deprecate is often a form of exaggeration which people do not notice, because it appears to be its opposite.”

— Idries Shah