Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.
MAN: Kick him-he'll forgive you. Flatter him-he may or may not see through you. But ignore him and he'll hate you
When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
None should say: 'I can trust' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying: 'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.
Enemies are often former or potential friends who have been denied - or think that they have been denied - something.
You need not wonder whether you should have an unreliable person as a friend. An unreliable person is nobody's friend.
The Sufi is One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.
An egocentric pessimist is a person who thinks he hasn't changed, but that other people are behaving worse than before.
When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
The more wakeful a man is to the things which surround him, the more asleep is he, and his waking is worse than his sleep.
Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken.
When the ignorant have become numerous or powerful enough, they have been referred to by a special name. This names is 'the Wise'.
Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.
The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.
Many things which are called 'secrets' are only things withheld from people until they can understand or effectively experience them.
He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah.
A certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence; I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
It is not important to have said a thing first, or best - or even most interestingly. What is important is to say it on the right occasion.
If you give what can be taken, you are not really giving. Take what you are given, not what you want to be given. Give what cannot be taken.
Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?
There is a Persian proverb: 'To test that which has been tested is ignorance.' To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse.
A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions.
When the lion had eaten its fill, and the jackals had taken their share, the ants came along and finished up the meat from the bones of the haughty stag.
The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge. No real knowledge is common.
The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.
It is not enough that there is a collection of people with the common aim of working in unison towards an objective... Aspiration and desire only are not enough.
Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.
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.
If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!
Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
Prescribing hard work for the soft, or easy work for the hardy, is generally nonsense. What is always needed in any aim is right effort, right time, right people, right materials.
Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.
You have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember - and generally more practical.
To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.
From imperial, economic and ideological causes, many cultures are the inheritors, and hence the prisoners, of attitudes of scorn and disdain for other faiths – outlooks which are not ennobling to anyone.
If the path has been laid down, why the successive appearance of different teachers? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel, if everything were as cosy and sequential as primitive longing so easily convinces us?
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.
... when we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief.
There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.
People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.
We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before.
If you are uninterested in what I say, there's an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say, and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what formed your attitude?
Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature
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.
One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.