Monday, December 24, 2012

Anywhere but here.

It feels like a good night for some quotes.

“Listen a hundred times; ponder a thousand times; speak once.”
—  Turkish Proverb

“Beware of backbiting, for backbiting is more serious than adultery. A man may commit adultery, and drink [wine], and then repent, and Allah will forgive him. But, the backbiter will not be forgiven by Allah until his [backbiten] companion forgives him.”
—  Prophet Muhammad saws صلى الله عليه وسلم‎

“Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.”
—  An excerpt from a lecture by Sheikh Abdel Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) given to a conference of British converts on September 17 1997

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”
—  Aldous Huxley

When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.
—Barbara Bloom, on Kintsugi

“Don’t give up on those you love. Give them time, give them space, give them love, but don’t give them up.”
— Shaykh Waleed Basyouni”

“The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying ‘anywhere but here’.”
—  E.E. Cummings

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