Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
Naguib MahfouzRead
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Interpretation
Sufism offers enjoyment but doesn't provide concrete answers to deeper questions.
In this quote, Naguib Mahfouz illustrates Sufism's allure and beauty, akin to that of poetry. However, he emphasizes that while Sufism invites contemplation and relaxation, it ultimately remains a temporary escape rather than a definitive solution to life's profound mysteries.
In practice
During a discussion on spirituality, this quote can highlight the allure of mystical practices.
Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.
As for life's tragedies, our love will defeat them. Love is the most effective cure. In the crevices of disasters, happiness lies like a diamond in a mind, so let us instill in ourselves the wisdom of love.
If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.
I believe in life and in people. I feel obliged to advocate their highest ideals as long as I believe them to be true. I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from rebellion would be a form of treason
I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.
Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury.
The law of Karma is the law of causation.
There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church's infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary manner any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility.
The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.
Meditation is the royal road to the attainment of freedom, a mysterious ladder that reaches from earth to heaven, darkness to light, mortality to Immortality.
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.
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