Top 450 Idries Shah Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

353. “Superior experience and knowledge will be made available to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth, capacity and earning of it.”

— Idries Shah

354. “Remember that greed includes greed for being not greedy.”

— Idries Shah

355. “Haz de la humanidad tu morada.”

— Idries Shah

356. “Knowledge cannot be attained except through humility.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

358. “Are you ignorant enough to expect horsemanship from blacksmiths?”

— Idries Shah

359. “Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots.”

— Idries Shah

360. “Many Sufis are not guides.”

— Idries Shah

361. “Do not tell your secrets to everyone in this headquarters, Earth. We have surveyed it well. There was nobody to whom to entrust secrets.”

— Idries Shah

362. “The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

364. “One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are.”

— Idries Shah

365. “Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.”

— Idries Shah

366. “As the Eastern saying, by the sage Hilali, has it, ’one person who understands is worth a hundred who merely obey a custom.”

— Idries Shah

367. “The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.”

— Idries Shah

368. “How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body?”

— Idries Shah

369. “Sufism is known by means of itself.”

— Idries Shah

370. “The intellect is not sovereign: knowledge is.”

— Idries Shah

371. “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

372. “When sense has left a head, it should be called a tail.”

— Idries Shah

373. “Hay tantos caminos hacia la verdad como almas humanas.”

— Idries Shah

374. “Rust through washing never became white.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

376. “Wisdom gives honour to nobility, and nobility to everything else.”

— Idries Shah

377. “The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

379. “The aspirant has to be guided by a mentor. The stage at which this guidance can take effect is seldom, if ever, perceptible to the learner.”

— Idries Shah

380. “Knowledge. How curious that a man who closes his hand upon air so often thinks that he has a ruby within his grasp.”

— Idries Shah

381. “Sufism is, in operation, pragmatic.”

— Idries Shah

382. “Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.”

— Idries Shah

383. “Knowledge gives nothing to a man until he gives everything to it.”

— Idries Shah

384. “A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.”

— Idries Shah

385. “Information about the activities of one body of Sufis may be harmful to the potential of another.”

— Idries Shah

386. “Se necesita mucho viaje antes de que el verde hombre madure.”

— Idries Shah

387. “None meets harm who knows his capacity.”

— Idries Shah

388. “Sufism, they say, is that which enables one to understand religion, irrespective of its current outward form.”

— Idries Shah

389. “Better to quarrel with a friend than to support enemies.”

— Idries Shah

390. “Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.”

— Idries Shah

391. “The happiness of the superficial: when a man who has lost his donkey finds it again.”

— Idries Shah

392. “Understanding and knowledge are completely different sensations in the realm of Truth than they are in the realm of society.”

— Idries Shah

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

— Idries Shah

394. “He who sleeps on the Road will lose either his hat or his head.”

— Idries Shah

395. “The Sufis say, “This is not a religion; it is religion.”

— Idries Shah

396. “We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.”

— Idries Shah

397. “Sufism is transmitted by means of the human exemplar, the teacher.”

— Idries Shah

398. “What you are pleased to call Sufism is merely the record of past method.”

— Idries Shah

399. “Si tienes dos camisas, vende una y con el dinero compra una flor”.”

— Idries Shah

400. “It is not Sufism if it does not perform its function for you. A cloak is no longer a cloak if it does not keep a man warm.”

— Idries Shah