Sufi Quotes - Page 6

• I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Fate, Destiny, Long Ago

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.294, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

  Rumi

  Inspirational, Friendship, Thank You

  Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi, “The Guest House”

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• Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Self, Helping, Mortality

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• Look at Senegal, about 90% of the Muslims in Senegal are Tijani or Qadiri Sufis. Among them, they have very great teachers who have written poems about al-Hallaj, and they have not been killed. In fact, it's Sufism that brought Islam through all of Senegal, right under our noses the last couple of centuries. And you can go down the same line through Indonesia and Malaysia.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Teacher, Couple, Islam

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• How did the Turks become Muslim? They became Muslim through the Sufis. The Arabs never conquered the Turks. There were people in early Islam who were speaking like Hallaj, who spoke about the Truth, about reaching the Truth, about being one with the Truth, and not only they were not killed, but they were great heroes of their own culture, and there is a university in Turkey named after one [Sufi Saint.]

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Hero, Turkeys, People

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Sufis have always been those that have tried to purify the ethics of Islam and society. And they don't have their hands cut off from the external action at all. For example, the bazaar in which the Sufis were very strong always dominated economic life in Islamic world. They could give a much more sane and Islamic form of activity when the economic life of Islam moved out of the bazaar to new parts of Islamic cities with modernized Muslims, who took it in another light and it became very, very anti Islamic, and much against many of the most profound practices of Islamic societies.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Strong, Islamic, Cutting

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I am a proud Christian who has been greatly tutored by Hindus and Buddhists and Sufis and others, and I stand and I speak from that place.

  Van Jones

  Christian, Buddhist, Proud

  Source: pen.org

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• If you have a billion Muslims, 900 million of them were not brought into Islam by any kind of invasion, but most of them through the Sufis, because human beings are such that they are affected by people of spiritual character. Certainly when they display nobility and hospitality and gentility and love and are not selfish or aggressive, and they are honest.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Spiritual, Selfish, Character

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• To those who say "Sufism is apolitical" or "no politics," I respond: "No politics is politics." Look at the very old African Sufi tradition, the Asian Sufi tradition, or the North African Sufi tradition. Then you get it and understand what Sufism is all about wisdom, courage and resistance.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Asian, Looks, Resistance

  "Tariq Ramadan: My Absence Would Certainly Be The Most Powerful Speech I Have Ever Given At ISNA". Interview with Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. August 14, 2014.

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• The very essence of the Sufi spiritual tradition requires you to purify your heart, to liberate yourself from your ego and to be courageous in facing any corrupt power, injustice and oppression. Unfortunately, colonial powers pushed an agenda by using Sufism against resistance, and some ulama played that game in the past and in the present.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Spiritual, Heart, Past

  "Tariq Ramadan: My Absence Would Certainly Be The Most Powerful Speech I Have Ever Given At ISNA". The Islamic Monthly Interview, www.theislamicmonthly.com. August 14, 2014.

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• He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah.

  Idries Shah

  Love Is, Beloved, Abandoned

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• When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them.

  Rumi

  Love, Spiritual, Sleep

  Rumi (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.147, Penguin UK

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• Everyone in Iran is perceived to be a child with a paternal authority vested in the Guardian Council and the Sufi elders. They're supposed to be grateful. They can never for a moment not be afforded this wonderful protection. The father who will never go away. The father who will never quit caring for them.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Children, Father, Grateful

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• In fact many Hindu yogis and Sufis met, they became friends, they spoke about the knowledge and love of God; about all the similarities that exist. And then the simplicity of Islam, the fact these people practiced what they preached brought many, many Hindus into Islam.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  People, Simplicity, Islam

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.

  Anne Waldman

  School, Ethos, People

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• It's quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he's neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one's glimpsed the divine, one's left these man-made distinctions behind.

  Karen Armstrong

  Christian, Home, Men

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.

  Bruce Chatwin

  Journey, Als, Way

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• I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.

  Feisal Abdul Rauf

  Philosophy, Islamic, Teaching

  "Creating A New Vision Of Islam In America". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. May 9, 2012.

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• Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.

  Rumi

  Rocks, Wildflowers, Littles

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• The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart

  Rumi

  Wisdom, Islamic, Heart

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• Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

  Feisal Abdul Rauf

  Self, Evil Within, Shining

  "Imam Rauf: What's right with Islam" by Feisal Abdul Rauf, www.cnn.com. September 12, 2010.

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• We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before.

  Idries Shah

  Art, Views, People

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• A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes.

  Russell Page

  Buddhism, Men, Garden

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• The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.

  Idries Shah

  Spiritual, School, Thinking

  "The Commanding Self".

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• The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are the necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?'

  Eknath Easwaran

  Spiritual, Lasts, Firsts

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