c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful.The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.This is invaluable for an artist.Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell."Page 68
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Never focus on the end. Only focus on your first step.
— Brodi Ashton, Evertrue
A student will find that he is more affected by one book which he has truly mastered than by 20 books which he has merely skimmed.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
When I turn down the volume, it's amazing how much I can actually hear.
— John Waire
Collaboration requires focusing on everything from vision and values to how individuals can feel they are making a real contribution.
— Jane Ripley, Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster
All true leaders have learned to say no to the good in order to say yes to the best.
— John Maxwell
Open-mindedness is a precondition for generating new ideas, but focusing on the problem is almost equally important.
— Eraldo Banovac
Focus on doing small things consistently rather than a big thing once a while
— Dhaval Gajera
The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.
— Joseph Epstein
For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.
— Joseph Epstein
When the bullseye becomes as big as an elephant in your mind, you won’t be able to miss it.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
concentrate less on people and much on purpose. People can put your purpose in disarray
—  your purpose can put people in disarray.
The opposite of busy in today's world is sustained, focused attention. It is deep engagement in activities that really matter to us, or in conversations with those we care about.
— Tony Crabbe, Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much
To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want.
— Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
Most people who lose their lives because life might be down for them only refuse to know what a tuber of yam that is put into the soil goes through before it comes up as a fresh green creeping plant to bear yet another bigger tuber
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
— Virginia Woolf
be much more friendly to such things that matter most .Things that will propel your vision and ambition to higher heights. Things that will help you enlarge your tentacles. Do not look down on small things however
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
You are more focus when you confront.
— Sunday Adelaja
Some people succeed not because they have wealth and education, but because they have firm focus.
— Jorge P. Guerrero
...a disciplined pursuit of less will keep us focused and make the greatest impact.
— Tim Hiller, Strive: Life is Short, Pursue What Matters
The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Waking Up at Rembrandt's
Where your attention goes, your time goes
— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability
That was a thing of wolves; they could know the past and the future, yet keep their attention on the hunt. Could he do the same? Allow himself to be consumed when needed, yet keep balance in other parts of his life?
— Robert Jordan, Towers of Midnight
If you want to save your time, learn to be focused on your purpose to the utmost.
— Sunday Adelaja
Yohannes D. Asega > My Quotes(showing 1-1 of 1)sort by ↑ topup up positiondown down↓ bottomRemove this quote from your collectionArthur Schopenhauer“We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
A man that is focused on his purpose always saves his time.
— Sunday Adelaja
When building a team do not look at people’s weaknesses, instead look at their strengths.
— Sunday Adelaja
Only by focusing on God can we reach our goal.
— Sunday Adelaja
The leader must be focused on the goal.
— Sunday Adelaja
Never be focused on yourself.
— Sunday Adelaja
In fact the trick good shooters deploy is change of focus from long to short and vice versa. And that should happen fast.The modus operandi is an alignment – of long Focus (long term vision) with due validation with respect to current status (short term goals).
— Priyavrat Thareja
Ask yourself...If I walk a tight rope,will I fall ,If I shake my balance of thought will it deter me and if I stay focused will I succeed?.~bns
— Bluenscottish
Maintain focus on what God called you to do.
— Sunday Adelaja
risk is everywhere and we all do take risk everyday, knowingly or unknowingly.Ordinary risk produces ordinary men and extraordinary risk equals extraordinary men. The unique line of boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary is the risk they both take. Great and extraordinary people patiently take a visionary, calculated and an avant-garde risk regardless of the susurrant and cacophonic call of the masses to retreat. They fall, they learn and they move. Without taking a thoughtful risk, we risk our lives unthoughtfully each day
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Sadly, when a person's possessions distract him from his purpose, he usually ends up losing both.
— Orrin Woodward
Making the attempt is what matters most.
— Gary   Hopkins
Mix a little time with some space, and suddenly good things fall right into place. No worries, don't doubt it - just build!
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
The Disciplined Leader is someone who focuses on the 20 percent of activities that drive 80 percent of results.
— John    Manning, The Disciplined Leader: Keeping the Focus on What Really Matters
Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity.
— Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
When life throws you a curve ball, have a good eye.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use).
— Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
Entrepreneur, become so disciplined that even your distractions become focused.
— Onyi Anyado
Entrepreneur, make today count but don't let the day count you. ~ Onyi Anyado.
— Onyi Anyado
You have to be so disciplined that even your distractions become focused.
— Onyi Anyado
Prayer is listening.
— Søren Kierkegaard
When you're driving, you don't focus on everything at once, but you have peripheral awareness of it, right? You focus on what you need to at any given moment, whether it's the car in front of you, the jackass in the lifted truck passing you, or the sirens behind you, whatever. Everything exists, everything is there, but you don't have to see it all at once. Does that help? You don't have to see all the bindings you're seeing right now. Just focus on the outlines of the physical stuff you saw before.
— Kevin Hearne, Trapped
When (an advocate) is not thoroughly acquainted with the real strength and weakness of his cause, he knows not where to choose the most impressive argument. When the mark is shrouded in obscurity, the only substitute for accuracy in the aim is in the multitude of the shafts.
— John Quincy Adams
Restriction often enhances clarity.
— Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline
Here, there's no anger, no loss, not even fear. When he's battling, everything has a crystal clarity, just action and reaction.
— Anonymous
MAKE SUCCESS HAPPENSuccess is like a camera. Only focus on what is most important. Ignore trivial details. Concentrate on your main goal image for success. Develop your pictures. If they don't turn out, don't give up. Take more shots at it. Always be persistent. Focus on making success clearly happen.
— Mark LaMoure
Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.
— Peter Thiel
Handle the little things well
—  for they become the great things.
Divided attention destroys best intentions. Singular focus is the friend to success.
— Benjamin Lotter
Life doesn't change when you meet a guy and life doesn't fall apart when you break up with one. We are teaching young female readers the wrong things through books not only expressing this point, but also using these two concepts as turning plot points of novels.
— Meghan Blistinsky
Concentration is a powerful force, it is the mark of seriousness that attracts certain energies to complete your half-done work.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
— David Brooks
Kennedy echoed Stanley Baldwin that a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.
— Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure
When you eyes is fixed on the prize or reward.It gives you hope to stay focus until the vision is fulfilled.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In every competition, it's not just a great deal of talent that you need. Everyone who joins have that or else they would not be so confident to be in the race. Focus though is the one thing that most people don't have. So you have to stay the most focused. Do not stray from your goal. If you want to win the game, you have to be in the game.
— Laarni Venus Marie Nillama
Focus on the systematic process and the things you have control.
— Balenti Peco Ramos
Focus on the Destination not on the journey
— George Bank jc
You Can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is not on focus.
— George Bank jc
Change your focus. Refocus on the desired results Once you acknowledge how easy it is to attract factors in your life that you do not want and accept how effective and simple the law is, you can start using it to your advantage.
— Malti Bhojwani, Don't Think Of a Blue Ball
The cost of anything is the focused energy you are prepared to bring to bear to pursue it.
— Steven Redhead, Unleash The Power of Your Heart and Mind
Limitless opportunities abound, governed only by your focus on achieving them.
— Steven Redhead, Unleash The Power of Your Heart and Mind
Dreams may seem far, but the steps we take are close. Focus on these steps and watch your dreams magically appear.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.
— David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
When you focus on revenge, you're uploading only negativity to your system. You should focus on moving forward and enjoy the little things in life. For we know, that innocent smile of yours is a big obstacle in the eyes of the haters.
— Fasela Oosterwolde
When you focus on want, you become an endless cycle of wants. To get, simply release, and then gently invite.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Everything you need comes into focus when you abandon the unneeded.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
It is much easier to focus on what you like than on what you dislike.
— Raphael Zernoff, I Am
When you focus on want, you become an endless cycle of wants.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
All of history has pointed its refining focus to your life this moment.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When one learns to focus energy through surrender and sensitivity, they become free, and can access the expansiveness of endless possibility.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When I have a mission, it gives me something to focus on.
— Duncan Bannatyne, Anyone Can Do It
If you are feeling stressed out, stop and take 10 deep breaths...it really does help! Then focus your mind on one thing and one thing only; things are only overwhelming when you look at them all at once.
— B. Dave Walters
Set a clear focus in your life , and fear will be crowded out. The more you fix your eyes on God’s purpose for you, the more you will overcome your fear.
— David Jeremiah, What Are You Afraid Of?
The problem is, first take your eyes off the problem and focus on a solution.
— Anthony Liccione
If your sole focus is money, you may create a successful startup. But if it's impact, you can probably create history.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you've got, you're more likely to do it.And this is precisely why it's difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part.
— Seth Godin
I wouldn’t say “art” as much as “virtue,” in the ancient Greek sense of “andreia” – manly action – or “arete,” excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making “cold calls” if you’re opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We’re trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn’t say “art,” I’d say “virtue.
— Steven Pressfield
The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.
— Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life
True freedom lies within how and if we choose to fly,Perhaps I need to focus on flying,
— Nicole Renee Wyatt, Butterflies Are Free?
whenever we stop doing something, we start doing anything
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
A true DreamChaser knows how to sacrifice beyond measure and live with the decision.
— Jordan Mitchell
Keep your focus laser-locked on what you want to create in your life.
— Mike Basevic, No Limits, Mastering the Mental Edge
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
Work on your goals, one step at a time. Remain focused and do not stop. You will be amazed how much you can accomplish over the years. In most things in life, it is not the speed but the consistency that matters.
— Roopleen
After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
It’s better to do one thing well than ten things poorly.
— Heather Hart
The ability to stay calm and focused in the midst of change is what distinguishes great leaders from those just collecting a paycheck.
— Todd Stocker
Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.
— Steve Jobs
Therefore, to maximize your productivity, deliberately focus on precisely one thing at a time.
— Oran Kangas, Productivity: Big Ideas from the Top 10 Books
My best ideas come when I distance myself from day-to-day operations. It gives me more focus.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a novel at the same time, for example. But I’ve seen that writers who are starting out sometimes throw their energy in so many different directions that they can never finish any of the projects, much less all of them.To me a good test is this: what do you like to read? What kind of book moves and affects you the most? Is it the memoir, the novel, the long poem-collection? Personally, I find myself most immersed in the novel, and that’s why I write them – they have the most magic for me. The joy of self-expression is exhilarating, but ultimately choosing one venue for it can make your work much better – and same for your chances of actually finishing something.
— Charles Finch
We are stuck on the obvious of this world, and it so fills our minds and our beings that there is little room for anything else, even if that "obvious" is merely a small part of what is real.
— Van Harden, Life in the Purple Wedge!
I want my list of works to be lean and mean and everything was urgent and had to be done. Nothing to play the market. My family’s had to suffer for that, that I haven’t done commercial jobs just to bring home the bacon.
— Josh Alan Friedman
Never worry about what you can't control...Focus on what you can.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
In a world of increasing uncertainty, expect...
— Gino Norris, Stress Diary Journal
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.
— G.K. Chesterton
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [BusinessWeek, May 25 1998]
— Steve Jobs
Want to go really fast? Slow down and focus.
— Tim Fargo
life has a funny way of testing you to see if you really want, what you say you want.
— Turcois Ominek
Intense, sustained focus fuels manifestation.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
Don’t focus on the mishaps
—  consider the pleasures instead.
He (Kris Medlin) has a communication with a force in pitching that most of us can’t talk to. It’s an awareness; it’s a sixth sense. When he steps in and stares in to that catcher, that little man on his shoulder’s going to take over and tell him what to do. And he’s done it well.
— Don Sutton
Focus is the ability to say no to the GOOD so you can fulfill the yes you said to the GREAT.
— Orrin Woodward
Focus isn't about hammering one nail all our lives.It’s about hammering lots of nails, one way, all our lives.
— Scott Ginsberg
When you don't know where you are going in life (No Clear Destination), you don't need direction... you need Divine Revelation
— Fela Durotoye
Excuses fall silent behind self-control, focus, and direction.
— Lorii Myers, No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book
Name your intention.
— Patti Digh, What I Wish For You: Simple Wisdom For A Happy Life
Successful people work hard on the right things b/c working hard on the wrong things only makes one worn out while failing.
— Orrin Woodward
And now that they have us here, under their control, they've dropped whatever act they had on earth. We're seeing them as they really are.' He dipped his glove into the water and watched as the water turned golden. The air suddenly smelled of citrus. 'Look! It's orange juice!''Josh, focus!''You sound just like Mom or Isis or whatever her name is.
— Michael Scott, The Enchantress
Yesterday's shortcuts are today's nightmares. The race is quicker when we're stricter. Keep your eyes on today, and declare what you may.
— Mark  Donnelly
Set aside your repertoire of objections and own 100 percent of your focus.
— Lorii Myers, No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book
Own 100 percent of your focus. The most challenging of endurance drills will bring you to a level of optimal mental and physical performance.
— Lorii Myers, No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book
And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done.
— Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
Don't focus on the mountain; focus on the mountain mover!" HS/el
— Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power
Everyone defends his treasure, and will do so automatically.The real questions are, what do you treasure, and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask. You can, however, save time if you do not protract this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it immeasurably.
— Helen Shucman, A Course in Miracles, Combined Volume: Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers, 2nd Edition
When dreams are not clear, the results are often as blurred. You won't be able to arrive at your desired destination if you are not certain of where you're going. You have to be able to see clearly and perfectly.
— Jan Mckingley Hilado, Rich Real Radical: 40 Lessons from a Magna Cum Laude and a College Drop Out
Focus is the soul of success.
— Sandeep Kakkar
I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
In order to pick something up, you've got to put something down.
— Todd Stocker
The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.
— Don Chadwick
Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.
— J.I. Packer, 18 Words: The Most Important Words You Will Ever Know
It's not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.
— Nathan W. Morris
We spend a lot of time trying to get more and more things, not realizing that those things can never fulfill us. Learn from those who have gone before you - stuff can never satisfy your desires, so focus on THE ONE who can.
— Osayi Emokpae Lasisi, Impossible Is Stupid
As long as you allow your past to haunt you, you'll never be free to pursue your future. You won't even be able to focus on your present.
— Brian Klemmer, The Compassionate Samurai: Being Extraordinary in an Ordinary World
Infinite possibilities exist by keeping focus on what you really want to create your bliss.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
Focus on the highest, clearest, and most meaningful teaching you can find, and let all else go.
— Alan Cohen
Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church?
— James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.
Keep your eyes on the prize for you cant hit an unseen target but don't forget to pay the price
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school.	“Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked.	“Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick.	“You all have very strong stomachs,” she said. “But your powers of observation need some work.”	“What do you mean?” they asked. “We did just what you did.”	“There is one difference,” she replied. “The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked.
— David W. Jones, For the Love of Sophia: Wisdom Stories from Around the World and Across the Ages
Create your own miracles, don't just wait for miracles to happen. Infinite possibilities exist by keeping focus on what you really want.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
Those who row the boat don't have time to rock it while those who rock it don't have time to row it.
— Orrin Woodward
The ability to focus is the key separation point between those who move ahead and those who fall behind.
— Orrin Woodward
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
— Malcolm X
When you see a person who has been given more than you in money and beauty, then look to those who have been given less.
— Prophet Muhammad
It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence
— Noam Chomsky
Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other
—  nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking
Worry is itself an illness, since worry is an accusation against Divine Wisdom, a criticism of Divine Mercy.
— Bediüzzaman Said Nursî
They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1st Discourse) and Polemics
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?
— Alphonse de Lamartine, History of Turkey
I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.
— Malcolm X
The great majority of us are Muslims. We follow the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (may peace be upon him). We are members of the brotherhood of Islam in which all are equal in rights, dignity and self-respect. Consequently, we have a special and a very deep sense of unity. But make no mistake: Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it.
— Muhammad Ali Jinnah
True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.
— Malcolm X
None of you will have faith till he wishes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself
— Richard Spinos
...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and
— John  Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
I become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of Hussein, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
He causes huge bodies like sun to proclaim His Majesty through His Names the All-Gracious, Great, reciting: ' O Glorious One, O Great One, O Mighty One', while tiny animate creatures like flies and fish proclaim His Mercy, reciting: 'O Gracious One, O Compassionate One, O Generous One
— Bediüzzaman Said Nursî
There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-century science, logic, or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart.They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian modus operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself.
— Brad Thor, The Last Patriot
There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
— Malcolm X
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.
— Malcolm X
Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.
— Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
A'isha asked him: 'Does one come to Paradise only by the mercy of Allah?' He repeated three times over: 'No one comes to Paradise except by the mercy of Allah!' 'Not even you. Messenger of Allah?' she asked. 'Not even I, unless Allah enfolds me in His mercy.
— Anonymous
It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of secual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Do not be a people without a will of your own saying: If others treat well you will also treat well and if they do wrong we will do wrong
—  but accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and do not do wrong if they do evil.
Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you.
— Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
— Christopher Hitchens
Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.
— Samuel P. Huntington
The earth isn’t spinning because you told it to do so. Your intestines aren’t digesting by your command. You’re made up of a trillion cells who don’t ask your permission before offering their rakats. And we think submission is applying strict discipline to our worship? We think surrender is about not eating a pig? It’s just not that small to me. i can’t fit my deen into a neat little box, because to me everything comes from Allah. Birds sing Allah’s name. to say Allah is in this book and not that… do you know who you’re talking about? the Allah that made you from a clot and clothed in flesh… Allah is too big and open for my deen to be small and closed.
— Michael Muhammad Knight
A believer shall not be stung twice out of the same hole.
— Rickey Price
It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.
— Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Seeing that he owns absolutely nothing to ‘repay’ his debt, ‘his own consciousness’ of the fact ‘that he is himself the very substance’ of debt, so must he ‘repay’ with himself, so must he ‘return’ himself to Him Who owns him absolutely.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam: The Concept of Religion and The Foundation of Ethics and Morality
Allah exalts whom he wills!
— Imran Khan
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.
— Edward Said, Orientalism
People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy
Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence.
— Parwez Musharraf
Not all Muslims become involved in acts of violence. Yet all might be held culpable. THis is because that section of Muslim--in fact, the majority--who are not personally involved, neither disown those members of their community who are engaged in violence, nor even condemn them. In such a case, according to the Islamic Shariah itself, if the involved Muslims are directly responsible, the uninvolved Muslims are also indirectly responsible. (p. 91)
— Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, The True Jihad: The Concept of Peace, Tolerance and Non Violence in Islam
Interestingly, the more Americans report knowing about Muslim countries, the more likely they are to hold positive views of those countries. (p. 155)
— John L. Esposito, Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think
[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.
— Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus
Submission, when it is submission to the truth — and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful — has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes isweeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah.
— Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi
An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.
— The Economist
The first thing I would like to share with youhere is that when you help people, you don’t waitaround until they say thank you because you didn’thelp them so you can hear appreciation.
— Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective
Of course, a single verse of the Holy Qur'an or a hadith moves the faithful to good actions, but volumes of books would not move an unwilling person who is like an ass carrying a load of books.
— Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalvi
The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition
Islam and Sufism are one. Teaching that to understand Islam one must be a lover, how can one understand Islam when the heart is empty of love.
— Zarina Bibi
Ibn Ata' Allah said: "God may open up for you the gates of obedience, but without opening up for you the gates of acceptance. On the other hand, He may Allow you to fall into disobedience which happens to lead you to the right path. DISOBEDIENCE that teaches you HUMILITY is better than PIETY that fills you with VANITY and ARROGANCE.
— Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Islamic Awakening Between Rejection and Extremism
When the man, by means if 'ibadat, succeeded in curbing his animal and canal passions and has thereby rendered submissive his animal soul,making it subject to the rational soul, the man thus described has attained to freedom and existence;he has achieved supreme peace and his soul is pacified, being set at liberty, as it were, free from fetters of inexorable fate and the noisy strife and hell of human vices.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism
Man is like an island set in isolation in a fathomless sea enveloped by darkness, saying that the loneliness his self knows is so utterly absolute because even he knows not his self completely.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism
In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.
— Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam & Modernity in the Middle East
Repentance and yearning, and yearning and repentance: this is the total harvest of life.
— Khurram Murad, Dying And Living For Allah
To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.
— John E. Remsburg, The Christ
It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it is also perfectly understandable why the purification of the soul is considered an integral part of the methodology of knowledge.
— Osman Bakar, Tawhid and Science
From Aus B. Shurahbil" He heard Allah Messenger say: "One who strives to strengthen an oppressor and knows he is an oppressor has already left Islam. Baihaqi
— Ahmad Von Denffer, A Day with the Prophet