“A feeling of discouragement when you slip up is a sure sign that you put your faith in deeds”

Your desire for involvement with the world of means when Allah has withdrawn you from it is a fall from high aspiration.

Your desire to withdraw from everything when Allah has involved you in the world of means is a hidden appetite.

Dhikr is the reason for the life of the heart and leaving it is the reason for its death.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.

Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing…a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.

In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and, for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.

Hmm, should I stay on the underground when everybody else is selling out?’ Nowadays, you can just do it – have your name-brand clothes, do songs with rock n’ rollers – and it’s not considered selling out.