It is important that you get clear for yourself that your only access to impacting life is action.
Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more easily than their words.
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
It was better to know what people were really like than put your trust in someone who just wanted to hurt you in the end.
Allah opens up ways and creates loves in the hearts of people for those who walk on the path of Allah with their lives, property, and children.
Though you may be last to discover your follies, be always first to correct them.
Monks, one thing, if practiced and made much of, conduces to great thrill, great profit, great security after the toil, to mindfulness and self-possession, to the winning of knowledge and insight, to pleasant living in this very life, to the realization of the fruit of release by knowledge. What is that one thing: It is mindfulness centered on the body.