Top 450 Idries Shah Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Everything man needs is in the world.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

303. “It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.”

— Idries Shah

304. “Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.”

— Idries Shah

305. “You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.”

— Idries Shah

306. “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

307. “Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.”

— Idries Shah

308. “They say: ‘Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose the strength without gaining wisdom.”

— Idries Shah

309. “Los corazones de los nobles son las tumbas de las confidencias.”

— Idries Shah

310. “Enviar un beso por mensajero.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

312. “MAGHRIBI: Learning is in activity. Learning through words alone is minor activity.”

— Idries Shah

313. “Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: ‘What did you do that?’ Junaid said: ‘I was bowing before his single-mindedness. For his aim, that man has given his life.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

316. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

319. “You make me a sinner if you stop me giving you hospitality.”

— Idries Shah

320. “La independencia prematura es la hija de la vanidad.”

— Idries Shah

321. “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

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

— Idries Shah

323. “Los grandes hombres son grandes hasta que lo saben. Los santos son santos hasta que lo saben.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

326. “Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition.”

— Idries Shah

327. “The liar has a bad memory.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

336. “Those who can’t, try: those who can, don’t have to.”

— Idries Shah

337. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

344. “When you feel least interested in following the Way which you have entered, this may be the time when it is most appropriate for you.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

346. “Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

349. “Sufismo es aquello que consigue llevar el Conocimiento Superior al hombre.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah