“To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.”

Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.

We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.

To us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster.

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.

In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use.

Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness.

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

The awe of God is wisdom.

We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God?

It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.

Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.

To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.

To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words.

Man is a messenger who forgot the message.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

Sometimes,because we use the same words,we assume we mean the same thing

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

When I was a child, I thought of my Delta town as the center of the universe, but now I realize how little I know about the universe.

If we have only one that can govern, and we chose him… does that mean we’re not democratic?

All you have to do is say “yes.” Don’t make some big project out of it. Don’t make some big deal out of it. Just say “yes.” You don’t even know what it means to say “yes,” but you say it anyway. You’ll never know what it means to say “yes,” but you do it anyway.

I can spot empty flattery and know exactly where I stand. In the end it’s really only my own approval or disapproval that means anything.

Your desire for involvement with the world of means when Allah has withdrawn you from it is a fall from high aspiration.