from the path of this flood by means of a sincere repentance, so long as repentance is still possible and its gate remains open! I can almost see the gate already shut, the pledge foreclosed ⦗1⦘, the wing caught, and the Almighty has said, “The wrongdoers shall soon know to what place they will return” (26:227).

• Purchase your soul today, for the market is still open, the price is ready at hand, and the goods are cheap. Yet a day will come upon that market and its wares when you will obtain ⦗2⦘ neither a little nor a lot—“That is the Day of Mutual Loss and Gain” (64:9); “the Day when the wrongdoer will bite his hands” (25:27).

If you set out with no provision of God-consciousness
and, on the Day of Gathering, behold those who had prepared,
you will regret not having been like them
and that you did not store up what they had stored. ⦗3⦘

• A deed performed without sincerity and without conforming to the Sunnah is like a traveler who fills his saddlebag with sand: it only weighs him down and brings him no benefit.

• If you load your heart with the cares and burdens of the world while neglecting its devotions, which are its very food and life, you are like a traveler who burdens his mount beyond its capacity and withholds its fodder; how quickly the beast will collapse beneath him!

• One whose resolutions are scattered spends his life bewildered—achieving neither victory nor even a decisive failure. ⦗4⦘

• Can a driver who urges his mount on in frantic haste really stay in control? Not every gallop of sturdy camels is a smooth ride.