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"Sufism is, in operation, pragmatic."
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"A lie that could help someone focus on his life was better than a hundred simple truths."

"Spirituality cannot be an excuse for not making money!!! Just a justification for failure!"

"Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering."

"We must consult our means rather than our wishes."

"Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood."

"The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second."

"It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic."

"Her philosophy was, if it had a pulse, it could be killed. I didn't really have a philosophy, but I could see how talking with the school director would be difficult for her. If he said something she didn't like, chopping him to tiny pieces wouldn't exactly help me get into the school."

"You're just a huge romantic at heart, aren't you?""If there's cash involved, I'm anything you want me to be."

"Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease."
Explore more quotes by Idries Shah


"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."


"Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots."


"Of whom can we think well when it is believed that if nothing bad is done to you, this has been a kindness?"


"The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose."


"People who cannot trust are themselves not trustworthy, and therefore cannot be entrusted with important things."


"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."


"How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body?"
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