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"When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration."
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"Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!"

"It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren."

"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back."
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"When we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief."


"Much religious teaching in the world is in reality a confused or deteriorated form, very different from its roots."


"Of whom can we think well when it is believed that if nothing bad is done to you, this has been a kindness?"


"To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them."


"How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body?"


"Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes."


"None should say : 'I can trust,' or 'I cannot trust' until he is a master of the option, of trusting or not trusting."
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