Idries Shah Quotes

In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Knowledge goes hand and hand with truth.

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

Everything you know could already be wrong.

You have to be careful what you think you know.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are.

When people say “clean as a whistle”, they forget that a whistle is full of spit.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.

The problem with assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

What, concretely, is Enlightenment ?" "Seeing Reality as it is," said the Master. "Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?" "Oh, no! Most people see it as they think it is." "What's the difference?" "The difference between thinking you are drowning in a stormy sea and knowing you cannot drown because there isn't any water in sight for miles around.

That's what the world is like: people talk as if they knew everything, but ifyou dare to ask a question, they don't know anything.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.