Sufi Way Quotes

ambitions that you're looking for is not going to stop until death .
no matter what your ambitions and you also forget the self ~ Qrembiezs

I longed to teach, but I had to wait until the desire had left me before I could really do so. ~ Idries Shah

I knock on your door
let me get back in and turn me inside
I came up with humiliation after humiliation ~ Qrembiezs

The Sufi way of thinking is particularly appropriate in a world of mass communication, when every effort is directed towards making people believe that they want or need certain things; that they should believe certain things; that they should as a consequence do certain things that their manipulators want them to do. ~ Idries Shah

A short time in the presence of the Friends (the Sufis) is better than a hundred years' sincere, obedient dedication. ~ Idries Shah

But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school. ~ Idries Shah

The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn. ~ Idries Shah

Holistic, unconditional love, agape, is the unity in which duality disappears. It is as if a certain internal boundary has vanished. With agape what we love is ourselves, the way a mother loves her child as herself. This is the meaning of loving another as yourself – transcending our phenomenal borders and experiencing ourselves in another and the other in, not apart from, us. Eventually, if love is comprehensive, it unites us with everything and allows us to know that we are everything. Therefore, how can we support the illusion of this isolated, separate self that is threatened by and defends itself from everything outside? Love returns us to the unity that is actually Reality. Reality is not the isolation, suspicion, envy, selfishness, and fear of loss that we have come to accept as normal; it is that we are all part of one Life. The same Spirit moves in us all. You come to know this better when you realize that we all have the same kinds of feelings, the same wish to be known and respected, to share ourselves and let down our defenses. We are continually faced with a choice between personal achievement, personal security, and comfort on the one hand, and working for the whole and helping everyone and everything toward perfection on the other. We are faced with a choice between looking out for ourselves and contributing wholeheartedly to a common good. We are faced with focusing on self-love or increasing our love of all Life. (p. 191) ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

Precious child, what is the meaning of the saying,
"We must die before death?"
It means we must make all the evil qualities,
all the qualities of satan within us, die before our death.
If those qualities die, then the world within us dies.
And if the world within us dies, then all the sins,
ghosts, demons, and satan's contained within it also die.
The desire for earth, gold, and sexual pleasure
all die along with the world within us.
All that is left is Allah and His power (quadrat).
If all the evil qualities die within us,
then we die before death
and only Allah's qualities, actions and conduct will remain.
Then there will be no death for us.
We will have attained eternal life (hayat).
If we attain eternal life, where will we live?
We will live in heaven, in God's kingdom.

To Die Before Death: The Sufi Way of Life- pg. 116-117 ~ Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

The pathways into Sufic thinking are, it is traditionally said, almost as varied as the number of Sufis in existence. ~ Idries Shah

raindrop drip to the earth
wet dusk
in the dim light of the sun
I looked at the restless human
My niche pensive
tightness in the heart
I was stunned for a moment
I call Your name
which is often forgotten
Allah ~ Qrembiezs

You live where you lived
You sit where you sit
Nothing seems to have changed
At the end of the day ~ Qrembiezs

The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.
The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this. ~ Idries Shah

Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt. ~ Idries Shah

The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated. ~ Idries Shah

People talk of the Sufi way. Wrong. If there is a way, it's not Sufism. ~ Art Hochberg

Hammered into the Heart

In the Sufi tradition light and knowledge are reflected from heart to heart. The heart is the organ of the higher consciousness - the consciousness of the Self. Spiritual teachings can be reflected or impressed directly into the heart, bypassing the limitations of the mind. . . . A further part of the Sufi training is to bring the mind into the heart, the mind 'hammered into the heart' as the Sufis say, so that the teachings given to the heart can be assimilated into everyday consciousness. A mind that has been brought into the heart can understand the ways of oneness, which are often paradoxical, sometimes even nonsensical, to the rational self. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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

Pick up a bee from kindness, and learn the limitations of kindness. ~ Idries Shah

Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Sleep is the boundary between being/existence and not-being/non-existence. ~ Wasif Ali Wasif

In order to spend out our time (life) we sell some of this time. We work for someone, we labour. In freedom we do slavery. ~ Wasif Ali Wasif

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. - RUMI ~ Jandy Nelson

The sort of man who, throwing a stone upon the ground, would miss. ~ Idries Shah

The world is ancient, but it has not lost its newness. ~ Wasif Ali Wasif

If you really want to learn, do not be surprised if someone tries to teach you. And do not lightly reject the method. ~ Idries Shah

My heart is your student,
it studies love,

And, like the night,
waits at the gate of dawn.

Where I go,
I follow where love's face leads.

Because oil flows
to the flame that it feeds. ~ Rumi

My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past. ~ A.R. Rahman

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. ~ Idries Shah

Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. ~ Idries Shah

Those who say 'I am ready to learn', or 'I am not ready to learn' are as often mistaken as they are correct in their surmise. ~ Idries Shah

The Sufi saint Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya was seen carrying a firebrand and a jug of water - the firebrand to burn Paradise, the jug of water to drown Hell ...
So that both veils disappear, and God's followers worship, not out of hope for reward, nor fear of punishment, but out of love. ~ Craig Thompson

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. ~ Idries Shah

I am the Real, for I have not ceased to be real – through the Real. ~ Idries Shah

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

On the Sufi path, first you discover the art of being alone amid the crowd. Next you discover the crowd within your solitude - the voices inside you. ~ Elif Shafak

Words have to die if humans are to live. ~ Idries Shah

There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance. ~ Idries Shah

From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths. ~ Karen Armstrong

If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed. ~ Idries Shah

Now is the time to unite the soul and the world. Now is the time to see the sunlight dancing as one with the shadows. ~ Rumi

Are you ignorant enough to expect horsemanship from blacksmiths? ~ Idries Shah

Khusrau darya prem ka, ulti wa ki dhaar,
Jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar.

English Translation.

Oh Khusrau, the river of love
Runs in strange directions.
One who jumps into it drowns,
And one who drowns, gets across. ~ Amir Khusrau

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can't plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head. ~ Ian McDonald

The major barrier to understanding is wishful thinking and following that which pleases one. ~ Idries Shah

But promoting philosophical skepticism is not quite the mission of this book. If awareness of the Black Swan problem can lead us into withdrawal and extreme skepticism, I take here the exact opposite direction. I am interested in deeds and true empiricism. So, this book was not written by a Sufi mystic, or even by a skeptic in the ancient or medieval sense, or even (we will see) in a philosophical sense, but by a practitioner whose principal aim is not to be a sucker in things that matter, period. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My heart gave me no respite,
I was like a madman last night.
All night I was beguiled,
Indulged and fantasized.

The flame of Love
In my heart burnt bright
And I was a moth
That on the flame alights… ~ Amir Khusrow Dehlavi

The person who is in tune with the Universe becomes like a radio receiver, through which the voice of the Universe is transmitted. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

Respond to every call that excites your spirit. ~ Rumi

There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. ~ Rumi

Of all the things we share, the most central is not in the liturgical or theological or canonical dimensions of the religion. It is in the realm of our personal​ search and experience of God.
I have danced in a Sufi fikre, sat for hours in a Zen Buddhist tea ceremony, been part of a Hindu puja, attended Shabbat services in multiple Jewish synagogues, and never, in any of those moments of worship, did I doubt these people were just as deeply involved in the search for God as I am. And that God was with us all.

And why not?

God is everywhere, they told us as children. But the question never goes away: Yes, but - where is God for me? I don't feel God. I don't hear God. I don't know how to know God. So God is surely in all these other places where the consciousness of God is also real, as well. But as much as I knew, even as a child, that it had to be true, that God was everywhere, still God was nowhere in particular in life. And, though I did not know it at the time, and so struggled through the thought of god for night after night in life, in that reality was all I needed to know about the search for God.

It was years, of course, before I realized that I was looking for Something rather than for Everything, and so I found nothing because I was looking for the wrong thing. And that is the kind of seeking that causes all the pain. ~ Joan Chittister,

In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. - Sufi proverb ~ Margaret Atwood

In my early twenties, I was traveling through a small town in Turkey called Cappadocia, when the divine spark of faith reignited within me like lightning. All it took was my eyes to fall upon a woman who was drowned in her worship of God. I watched her pray in an old seventeenth-century animal barn, as if nothing in the world existed but her divine Lover. She did not robotically repeat words of prayer like a formula; rather, every word she uttered came with a silent "I love you, my beloved Lord." Her words were like synchronized dancers swimming in unison in the ocean of love that poured out of her. She was the first person I had ever seen in my life that not only prayed but she herself became the prayer. ~ A. Helwa

The appearance of the mountain changes, according to when in the day you beheld it and which side you approached it from. Our intellect is thus limited, so it is best not to judge others, for they may also be gazing upon the same mountain but simply viewing it from a different angle - Huja ~ Rehan Khan

When the child is ill, the mother will know how to pray. ~ Wasif Ali Wasif

The world is also a tillage; sow and reap your crop, and preserve it. Throw away the chaff, and give it no importance ~ Master Nursi