Idries Shah Quotes

Just understanding that if you're not growing up, you're just moving backwards, and I'm a person that I always want to grow and learn and not be the smartest person in the room, because when you're not the smartest person in the room, you're always learning things.

I am very self-critical, but that's a good thing because it keeps me growing as a human being and as a musician.

You can't be successful with other people if you haven't paid the price of success with yourself.

I take very seriously this notion that my highest job is to live a better life, all the time and to the best of my ability. I need to monitor my own progress - take my own inventory - and clean my own closet. I am trying to do all that.

I often feel like saying, when I hear the question 'People aren't ready,' that it's like telling a person who is trying to swim, 'Don't jump in that water until you learn how to swim.' When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water. And I think people have to have an opportunity to develop themselves and govern themselves.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

As you practice things, you get better. I mean I've worked very hard on changing my life and taking what is good about it and trying to jettison the things I think were not good about it. I think the key word is "discipline," focus. I'm always working at it, but I'm not always successful.

I've decided I can't really control people's perceptions of me. All I can do is decide on what I work on and how hard I work on it.

Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it ten per cent.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

I think I try to speak to the heart of the woman who I know is interested in growing into herself.

Extirpate two thoughts within thyself: do not consider thyself worthy of anything great, and do not think that any other man is much lower than thou in worthiness. Learn humble mindedness beforehand, which the Lord commanded in word and showed forth in deed. Hence, do not expect obedience from others, but be ready for obedience thyself.

Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.

When you coach and teach leadership, most people think about them. It's like you're the leader and how do you influence them. Clearly, leaders do take their followers, their flock, their enterprise, their business - whatever - hopefully to a better place. But I think the foundation of what makes really great leaders is they lead themselves, and they're conscious about knowing themselves and coaching and leading themselves in a very profound way. The simplest of us talk to ourselves. The question is, "Do we really lead ourselves?"

Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

The first step in building a solid, dependable attitude is to be realistic, not only about your inherent capabilities, but also about how well you are playing to those capabilities on any given day.

I think all of us make the mistake of thinking we're going to change people when we get together. But we're not. People are who they are. And people change in their own time.

I love people who really turn their lives around. I think it's such a wonderful human trait.

It's much nicer to be praised than to be damned. But you have to have a certain sense of your own priorities and ideas about what works and what doesn't because otherwise, if you're just looking for eternal validation all the time, you can be motivated by the wrong things and I don't think it's as personally satisfying in your own work.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.

I guess I am conscious of my weaknesses, and I think pacing is probably my biggest. I don't know if I think the clarity thing is actually a weakness. It was a stylistic choice.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike, and I think that's a matter of education and preparation, and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.