Idries Shah Quotes

To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.

Who can take a single step with his head?

If I had the hand strength to sign autographs for everybody in Kansas City, I would... but its just impossible to get to everyone.

Impossibility is a dictionary word.

It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.

If I dated as many people as they said I have, then I would be dead, because it's just not possible.

Some things are impossible.

It can no more negotiate sovereignty-association then it can negotiate sour sugar, dry water, boiling ice, or stationary motion.

You can't win every year. This is impossible in England.

Soorma' means someone who does something that is impossible. It's the perfect title.

There's no getting blood out of a turnip.

You can't climb a tile wall.

It is, we believe, Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump Can extinguish hell.

You can't build a substantial V out of turtles!

They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

What you want is one thing, and what you cannot really obtain is another.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

It is either easy or impossible.

That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love. ~Page 133.

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Man cannot live upon words, however he may try.

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.