I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.
We are in a waking dream. . . We see worlds where others scheme.
The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego.
God is with the broken-hearted. When your heart breaks, it’s a good thing – the breaking of the heart is what opens it up to the light of Allah. The dunya is designed to break your heart, to crush it.
Every civilization: Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, all of them understood that LEARNING was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING, LEARNING was NOT to MAKE MORE MONEY; It was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING.
Practice makes permanent, not perfect. If you practice the wrong thing, you make the wrong act permanent.
If you take a child and you throw the child up there is a point where you see this, they go into this state of complete panic and then when they come back to your arms they are laughing. That is dunya, I guarantee you, that moment, that is your life, you came from God and you are going back to God and there is just a moment when you are in a complete state of panic but just relax, you are in good hands. Just relax.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
If obedience is the result of the instinct of the masses, revolt is the result of their thought.
The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.
My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don't have time for this, I feel tortured.