The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the higher purpose of religious life in guiding individual evolution over societal morality.
Muhammad Iqbal suggests that the ultimate goal of religious life transcends mere moral improvement within society. Instead, it seeks to direct the individual's personal evolution towards a more significant spiritual destiny, highlighting the importance of personal growth and fulfillment over societal norms.
In practice
In a discussion on spirituality at a community gathering, one could quote Iqbal to highlight personal growth through faith.
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
let this be our beautiful departure from stagnation; let our minds come alive; enter another dimension; go beyond the stars eagerly struggling to find that... which our naked eyes did not know existed; rise like a falcon born to soar and not be alone but be present amongst others.
The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.
The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.
The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.
You will not dishonor the divine perfections by judgments unworthy of them, provided you never judge of Him by yourself, provided you do not ascribe to the Creator the imperfections and limitations of created beings.
Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity -- an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
Jesus was loyal to his apostles, with full knowledge of their cowardice. He was loyal to the poor, accepting the criticism of the Pharisees, so the destitute would never feel deserted. He was loyal to his father, accomplishing his will even unto death.
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