Saracen شرقسان > Saracen's Quotes

“There is something about the universality of Islam that is unique and truly universal. It is a universality that transcends the concept of universality that is limited to the world of sense and sensible experience.”
― Syed Naquib Al-Attas

“Do not be deceived! The world in its entirety cannot replace a lost day of your youth.”
― Ibn Ḥāzim

“The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego.”
― Hamza Yusuf

“Without discipline, Religion would be impossible”
― Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart

“Reflection is the lamp of the heart. If it departs, the heart will have no light.”
― Imam Al-Haddad

“You must know everything that God has forbidden you so as to be able to avoid it, for the one who does not recognize evil falls into it.”
― Imam Abdallah ibn Alawi Al-Haddad

“Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy.”
― Abdal Hakim Murad

“Allah has names of Beauty: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Gentle, and many others. But He also has Names of Rigour: the Overwhelming, the Just, the Avenger. The world in which we live exists as the interaction and the manifestation of all of the divine attributes. Hence it is a place of ease and of hardship, of joy and of sorrow. It has to be this way: a world in which there was only ease could not be a place in which we can discover ourselves to be true human beings. It is only by experiencing hardship, and loss, and bereavement, and disease, that we rise above our egos, and show that we can live for others, and for principles, rather than only for ourselves.”
― Abdal Hakim Murad

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
― Jalal Ad-Din Rumi

“Knowledge exists potentially in the human soul like the seed in the soil; by learning the potential becomes actual.”
― Imam Al-Ghazali

“در غم ما روزها بی گاه شد
روزها با سوزها همراه شد”
― مولانا جلال الدین بلخی

“If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.”
― Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi

“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is better for a leader to make a mistake in forgiving than to make it in punishing.”

—Prophet Muhammad

from Joel Hayward, The Leadership of Muhammad”
― Joel Hayward

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“‎"The indictment [the Western/modern question, 'Why be moral?'] also issued from a gross underrating of the 'moral' force that was regarded within the Islamic tradition as an essential and integral part of the 'law.' At the foundation of this underrating stood the observer's ideological judgement about religion (at least the Islamic religion), a judgment of repugnance, especially when religion as a moral and theological force is seen to be fused with law. The judgement, in other words, undercuts a proper apprehension of the role of modernity as a legal form, of its power and force. Historical evidence [in modernity/Enlightenment thought and its intellectual progeny] was thus made to fit into what makes sense to us, not what made sense to a culture that defined itself -- systematically, teleologically, and existentially -- in different terms. This entrenched repugnance for the religious -- at least in this case to the 'Islamic' in Muslim societies -- amounted, in legal terms, to the foreclosure of the possibility of considering the force of the moral within the realm of the legal, and vice versa. Theistic teleology, eschatology, and socially grounded moral gain, status, honor, shame, and much else of a similar type were reduced in importance, if not totally set aside, in favor of other explanations that 'fit better' within our preferred, but distinctively modern, countermoral systems of value. History was brought down to us, to the epistemological here and now, according to our own terms, when in theory no one denies that it was our historiographical set of terms that ought to have been subordinated to the imperatives of historical writing.”
― Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament

“I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.”
― Socrates