01UndatedDefinitions from Mulla Do-PiazaAdherent:Someone who will believe anything except what he should.Idries Shah / quote ↗
02UndatedCauses: As important a fact as any individual cause on earth is the vital incapacity of the human individual to distinguish between genuine cause and one which is foisted upon him by pressure, environment, propaganda, conditioning.If people had the sense they pretend to have, they would seek this fundamental distinction perceptible.Hardly anyone makes this effort. This is partly because it is an invisible but powerful part of their culture to teach that conditioned emotionality and ‘causes’ whose necessity, urgency or rightness is only conditioned into them, are necessarily, right.Idries Shah / quote ↗
03UndatedDefinitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.Idries Shah / quote ↗
04UndatedDefinitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.Idries Shah / quote ↗
05UndatedFrom the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.Idries Shah / quote ↗
06UndatedForms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.Idries Shah / quote ↗
07UndatedVirtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.Idries Shah / quote ↗
08UndatedForms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.Idries Shah / quote ↗
09Undated...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.Idries Shah / quote ↗
10UndatedVirtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.Idries Shah / quote ↗
11UndatedYou say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.Idries Shah / quote ↗
12UndatedHas it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?Idries Shah / quote ↗
14UndatedOur heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.Idries Shah / quote ↗
15UndatedPresence and AbsenceA 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.Idries Shah / quote ↗
16UndatedPeople carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.Idries Shah / quote ↗
18UndatedProverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.Idries Shah / quote ↗
20UndatedRumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.Idries Shah / quote ↗
21UndatedWhy do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?Idries Shah / quote ↗
22UndatedWell-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.Idries Shah / quote ↗
23UndatedPeople change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.Idries Shah / quote ↗
24UndatedThe would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.Idries Shah / quote ↗
