• Patience.
• When the urge to attain one’s hope grows strong, it demands tireless striving for it and keen vigilance lest the desired prize slip away.
• The miser is a pauper who earns no reward for his poverty.
• Better to bear the thirst of affliction than to drink from a fountain of condescending favors.
• A woman of honor would sooner go hungry than earn her keep with her own breasts.
• Ask none but your Lord; a servant who petitions anyone other than his Master only shames himself.
• The seed planted in seclusion yields the fruit of intimacy.
• Feel estranged from whatever will not remain with you, and take comfort in the One who never parts from you.
• The solitude of the ignorant breeds ruin, whereas the solitude of the scholar sets out with its shoes and water-skin in hand.
• When reason and certainty gather in the house of seclusion, summon reflection to join them, and an intimate exchange takes place:
You have heard a tale whose hearing never wearies—
delightful to us in both its prose and its rhyme.
Whenever the soul recalls it, its hardship departs,
and the darkness oppressing the beleaguered heart is lifted. (1)
• If a foolish word escapes your enemy’s mouth, do not follow it with its like; you would only fertilize it, and the offspring of quarrelling is a blameworthy brood.
• Your zeal in defending yourself is but a sign of your ignorance of it; were you to know it as it truly is, you would