“In God, there is no sorrow or suffering or affliction. If you want to be free of all affliction and suffering, hold fast to God, and turn wholly to Him, and to no one else. Indeed, all your suffering comes from this: that you do not turn toward God and no one else.”

Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me.

The happiness of the drop is to die in the river.

Do not fix hopes on your health, and do not laugh away life. Remember how they walked and now all their joints lie separately, and the tongue with which they talked lightly is eaten away by the worms.

It is sometimes said that we drink our religion with our mother’s milk.

Desires make slaves out of kings and patience makes kings out of slaves.

Those who look for seashells will find seashells; those who open them will find pearls.

Do not allow your heart to take pleasure with the praises of people, nor be saddened by their condemnation.

If you do not prepare now for the Afterlife, then when will you do so?

A man of bad character punishes his own soul.

Work for your terrestrial life in proportion to your location in it, and work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it.

This visible world is a trace of that invisible one and the former follows the latter like a shadow.

Whoever passes forty without his virtue overpowering his vice, let him get ready for hellfire. This advice contains enough for people of knowledge.

Man’s nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint.

The corruption of religions comes from turning them to mere words and appearances.

Does money upset the hearts of learned men? He answered, “men whose hearts are changed by money are not learned.”

If those who do not possess knowledge avoid the scholarly discussions, disagreement will end.

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.