Idries Shah Quotes

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

Once you realize something, then you can't pretend you don't know it any more.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

If you don't know about it, you can't get it.

Ignorant men don't know what good they hold in their hands until they've flung it away.

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

The beginning of all wisdom is recognition of facts

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

We are wiser than we know.

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get.

There is a difference between listening and hearing, just as there is a difference between seeing and knowing.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

You don't know, but I'm noticing.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.