Change is not progress.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
A true teacher defends his students against his own personal influences.
That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others.
Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?
Miracles arise from conviction. Be convicted about these things: Miracles can happen. Miracles do happen. Love makes them happen.
The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir’s big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else. . . If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar.
The strategy of winning is gaining personal power. There are no techniques to learn that will cause you to win. You need power, balance and wisdom to win and to learn from your loses.
Dealing with adversity is like preparing for surgery. By putting our faith in what the doctor has said, we believe we will be better off if we have the surgery. But that does not make it any less painful. By submitting to the hand of a surgeon, we are saying that our ultimate goal is health, even at the cost of pain. Adversity is the same way. It is a means to an end. It is God's tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives.