Idries Shah Quotes

In high school, I would drive my teachers batty. They would make a statement, and I would say, 'Why is that?' They didn't want to be questioned.

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect ... Your have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

One of my teachers used to call me Prince, because I always had a way of charming myself in and out of different situations.

The word of God is our only standard, and the Holy Spirit our only teacher.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

One point of difference between Hinduism and other religions is that in Hinduism we pass from truth to truth-from a lower truth to a higher truth-and never from error to truth.

Most performers reinvent themselves. Madonna, Michael Jackson, P. Diddy. They reinvent themselves into different kinds of images. Elvis Presley was always himself, an original, and he never tried to be anything but that.

The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers.

Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere

We live in this society where you must constantly be reinventing yourself. The big question is what are you doing next. The only thing they want is composed of these three elements: They want you to do it the exact same way because they want more of it; but they want it to be totally different; and they want it to be better. That's all you have to do. You just have to do something that's exactly the same, totally different, and better.

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

I'm a big skeptic so I won't just go off what an individual may tell me. I gotta do the research. I'ma get different literature on that one subject and just compare and contrast. I do my own selective studies.

But man's eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God's truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit's work as a teacher.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

Photographers want to reinvent you, to take you somewhere else, to show you in a completely different way. They look at your previous work, and try to figure out what they can do to show a new side of you.

Basically, the Buddhist attitude is that you should not accept certain things through sheer faith. And for that you need a skeptical attitude. Buddha himself made this clear to his followers. He said you should not accept those things I taught out of respect for me, but rather through investigation by yourself.

I've received more and more emails from teachers saying that they are beginning to teach presence in their classroom without necessarily calling it that or calling it anything, not as part of the official curriculum. It's like an underground movement not yet officially recognized by the educational authorities - at least not as far as I know!

Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other.

The real world out there isn't nearly as nice as some people prefer it to be, so don't swallow everything your high-born teachers tell you without takinga long hard look at it yourselves.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

I'd also talk about the period and of course all the different gender things that people might feel that they are. I'd be a terrible teacher because of what I don't know about that.

This is the first day of my new beginning. From now on I'm going to do things right. I'm going to be a different person, a good person. I'm going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered.

You shouldn’t blindly accept a leader’s advice. You’ve got to question leaders on occasion.