None meets harm who knows his capacity.

As the Eastern saying, by the sage Hilali, has it, ‘one person who understands is worth a hundred who merely obey a custom.

Mystics are no humans but a species different; they are always young and never do they die.

Hak cih na tolıdur kimseler Hakk’ı bilmez / Anı sen senden iste o senden ayru olmaz.

You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.

Saying of the ProphetFoodNobody has eaten better food than that won by his own labour.

Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: ‘Greed is the mother of incapacity’.

Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible.

When Fortune knocks, open the door,’ they say. But why should one make fortune knock, by keeping the door shut?

The means through which people may perceive Truth have forms; Truth has no form.

Learning without action is like wax without honey.(Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.

Salute to the Thief. Junaid of Baghdad was passing the scene of a public hanging, where a thief was on the scaffold. Junaid bowed towards the criminal. Someone asked him: ‘What did you do that?’...

Love is an involuntary gift that manifests unplanned.

Many Americans first fell in love with the poetry of the thirteenth century teacher and spiritual leader Jelalludin Rumi during the early 1990s when the unparalleled lyrical grace, philosophical brilliance, and spiritual daring of his...

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza. Worry: Something to make you unnecessarily ill.

Saying of the ProphetOppressionWhen oppression exists, even the bird dies in its nest.

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

Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.

Words have to die if humans are to live.

Saying of the ProphetObligation to LearnThe pursuit of knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.

But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH ‘things of the world’.

God”.

Remembering and ForgettingYou have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget.But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember – and generally more practical.

Self-mortification, far from producing liberation from material things, is far more likely to cause either an unhinged mind, delusions or a masochistic taste for more suffering, experienced, of course, as joy.

The only thing I know is that a person who is not busy with others is one who recognizes the truth of existence.

Our thoughts have prepared for us the happiness or unhappiness we experience.

Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.

However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can’t run away from your own feet.

The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.

The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.

You can learn more in half an hour’s direct contact with a source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the contact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of...

The more wakeful a man is to the things which surround him, the more asleep is he, and his waking is worse than his sleep.

Mediation – Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be.

Whoever has not first dug a well, should not steal a minaret.

Voice in the nightA voice whispered to me last night: ‘There is no such thing as a voice whispering in the night!

Sufi’s soul seeking serenity succeeds at the cost of the body which gets spifflicated by the spines of the social world.

Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt.

Saying of the ProphetThe JudgeA man appointed to be a judge has been killed without a knife.

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...

Remember the proverb: ‘A sign is enough for the alert, but a thousand counsels are not enough for the negligent.

The real generosity is when a man does something generous when nobody knows about it.

To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.

To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.

Dye your hair, certainly. But what can you do for your face?

Truth has no form.

The would-be students wish to transcend books.But, ask yourselves: if someone says that books do not contain wisdom, and yet he writes books; books do not contain Sufism, and yet he continues to publish books...

Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God.

Soar on to the King, the crown jewel,And then you’ll truly seeThat nothing is as beautifulAs His grand Majesty.