sufis

Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.

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

It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.

People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.

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

Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained

Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaWisdom: Something you can learn without knowing it.

Presence 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.

Our heads are filled with __nowledge_, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.

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

Has 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?

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

Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.

Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.