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 John Banville
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once...
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is...
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
