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 Steven Pinker
Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to...
The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics...
Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people...
We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.
Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge–not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of...
