Top 450 Idries Shah Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Enviar un beso por mensajero.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

306. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

311. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

318. “Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt.”

— Idries Shah

319. “Make mankind your dwelling place.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

321. “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.”

— Idries Shah

322. “Fettered feet in the presence of friends is better than living in a garden with strangers.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

330. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

346. “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

347. “Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition.”

— Idries Shah

348. “The liar has a bad memory.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah