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"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."
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"Getting to know who you are is the most essential information that you can find out about yourself."

"You need to know the constituency you belong to...and that is revealed by your constituents. When your constituents are speaking in public and making of stories, your constituency can be "journalism"."

"No one knows it all. Asking questions about the things that you don't know doesn't make you unintelligent. You don't have a million years on earth to make all the mistakes in the world and learn from them. You can learn from better informed people, and save yourself the headaches that come from making too many avoidable mistakes."
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"The question of divine knowledge is so deep that it is really known only to those who have it."


"The important place held by Jesus among the world's six hundred million Moslems... and the agreement of both religions about the necessity for surrender to God as the means of salvation, thus makes it comparatively easy for a Moslem to address himself to Christians: the sympathy and the history are already there."


"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."


"The decline in the influence of religion has been due, in the main, not to religion itself, but to the very shallowness of many practitioners. People who are indoctrinated and mistake implanted obsession for faith, are themselves destroyers of the very thing which they imagine themselves called upon to try to protect.In fact, of course, they have no such call: and their capacity to protect something which is other than their imaginings makes for a comical situation."


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


"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."
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