A Book of Life Quotes

“[T]he song of the Sufis, once it starts, never ends.

There is a traditional saying that you should never waste your time trying to find real Sufis because they are the ones who will find you. And this turned out to be perfectly true.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“The rules are simple. Prepare in silence. Train in stillness. Strain as much as possible to become worthy of facing the impossible. Maybe you'll be unlucky, or lucky, enough to be chosen but the chances are you won't. It's much more likely someone else will be picked who is far simpler and purer than you, untrained, unprepared: the timeliest reminder of what matters most.

Intelligence, everything anyone would think of as intelligence, is entirely irrelevant. It's just a question of being empty enough to transmit the will of the gods.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“All nature is waiting for us to become conscious because there's a particular quality of consciousness that only humans can provide. Nature needs that consciousness; cries out for it. And the process of deciphering Nature's need, then discovering how to respond to it, is what's called learning to become human.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“As the ancient Gnostics patiently explained almost two thousand years ago, there is no greater trap than to believe one has arrived at “the completion of all completions”—when in reality one hasn't even arrived yet at the very first mystery of existence behind which all the other mysteries after mysteries lie.

Then even liberation traps us in its net, thanks to the elegance and grace and speed with which we are caught by what we're sure has set us free.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“The precision of existence can never be known by the human mind. That's why the goal of every woman and man is to become human, but the purpose of being human is to leave everything human behind.
To discover this precision, one has to stop being a human and start being the mystery of life itself.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“Anyone who identifies with the body while alive will identify with it when it dies. And that's the end of their story. But whoever stays alive while the body dies instead of going unconscious realizes how much has been lost, knows at first hand what it means to be a human and sees the purpose of the body and understands how necessary it is.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life