We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.

What is humanity? To feel pain at the sorrows of our neighbours, to feel humiliated at the humiliation of fellow-beings.

Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.

Certain levels of human understanding cannot be attained, it is claimed, until the brain can work in more than one way.

The process of learning is the process of discovering what really exists.

Most of the supposedly Sufi organizations, exercises and “orders” are in fact only of archaeological interest.

The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured

Ibn El-Arabi wrote, ‘The Teacher is he who hears you, then unveils you to yourself

And Rumi tells us, ‘Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue’.

The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi.

At His door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? At his door all are seekers and He the sought.

If not for her truly sparkling personality, she would have been doomed.

When you truly face your pain you will only see yourself. Your fear was always you.

What people resist the most about spiritual healing is changing their minds.

You are where your brain is but not where a front-page headline is.

We live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about

In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

A real punk is punk on the inside.

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.