Idries Shah Mean Quotations

You are still adrift while you still think that a means is an end.

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.

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.

When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

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 generous person may not have wisdom: but, unlike others, he has the means to gain it.