Idries Shah Quotes

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

All beliefs are bald ideas.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

All human belief systems are inherently flawed.

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

To accept reason is impossible if you don't already possess it.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.