One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are.
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Idries Shah
The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate.
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Idries Shah
All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess)
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Blanche Bachelar
Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.
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Philip Rieff
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own .. . and that the trouble...
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Robert A. Heinlein
More Quotes By Clifford Geertz
A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.
It may be in the cultural particularities of people – in their oddities – that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity... It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
