Wisdom Quotes - Page 107

If you remember the creation (gossip about such and such a person), then remember Allah the Most High. Remembering Him is the medicine for remembering His creation.

Your desire to withdraw from everything when Allah has involved you in the world of means is a hidden appetite. Your desire for involvement with the world of means when Allah has withdrawn you from it is a fall from high aspiration.

Kindness is more persuasive than force.

Be content with what you have Be satisfied with your dwelling place to accommodate your enterprise, Restrain your tongue, And shed tears of regret regarding past sins you committed knowingly, and those you do not recognize.

I studied adab for thirty years and I studied knowledge for twenty years.

The hidden so-called scholars of old did not hide themselves and refuse to be seen. They did not close the door on their words and refuse to let them out. They did not shut away their wisdom and refuse to share it. But those times were all haywire. If it had been possible for them to act, they could have done great things, bringing all to Oneness without any sign of doing so. However, the times were not favorable and it was not possible, so they put down deep roots, remained still and waited. this was the Tao by which they survived.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

We all find time to do what we really want to do.

The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

Virtuous men alone possess friends.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

. . . [A]s a rule, the most learned persons do not produce the greatest results. We see that only too often.

Man's condition is never the same; he is humbled, then exalted; sometimes at peace, sometimes persecuted; enlightened today and plunged into darkness tomorrow. What is to be done? As I said, let us be prepared for whatever may happen.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.

When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.