• O you who would unlock the door of livelihood without the iqlīd (1) of taqwā (God-consciousness)! How can you broaden the road of sin yet complain that your provision is tight?
• Had you stopped where taqwā bids you stop, no aspiration would have slipped from your grasp.
• Sins are a barricade at the gate of earning, and “a servant is deprived of provision because of a sin he commits” (2).
• By Allah, whenever I came to visit you, I found the very earth folding up beneath my feet; and whenever my resolve turned away from your door, I tripped over my own hems (3).
• Spirits inside bodies are like birds inside cages; that which is meant for brooding is not the same as what is trained for the race.
• Whoever among the workers wishes to know his standing with the sovereign should look to the task the sovereign assigns him and the work with which he occupies him.
• Be one of the children of the Hereafter, not one of the children of this world, for the child follows its mother.
• This world is not worth the effort of merely walking toward it—so why race after it?
• The world is carrion, and the lion does not stoop to carrion.