Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?

To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.

Saadi’s dictum, in the Bostan: ‘The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe

… the Sufi attitude is: ‘Let the real truth, whatever it may be, be revealed to me’.

I have heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.You ask me what to do about them.It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race.Face that one first.

What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.

A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

They have fixed our nutrition and arranged our life-span. More than this, and ahead of this, efforts will not be productive.

Definition of a SufiTo learn, people must give up a great deal, and this includes ritual as something from which they imagine they might learn. It is to emphasise this that Abu-Yaqub al-Susi, quoted in Kalabadhi's Taaruf, states that the Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.