It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.

Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm.

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.

Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody

The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.

Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

From your confessor, lawyer and physician, Hide not your case on no condition.

It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.

There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

Do not reveal your thoughts to everyone, lest you drive away your good luck.

Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or Pope!

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.

A mask tells us more than a face.