Ibn al-Jawzi⦗1⦘ relates several of his sermons. He said:

I once heard him declare, “One bundle of grief is better than loads of ostensible deeds.” Then he recited:

How many sighs smoulder in my breast
for a son who, when he grew,
I hoped would walk the path of right—
but he grew up far from what I wished.

On another occasion I heard him chant:

My own clan envy me for my craft, for within my craft I am a knight;
I kept vigil through the night while they dozed—can the wakeful and the drowsy ever be equal?

He used to say, “You appoint Jews and Christians to authority; on the day of their festival they revile your Prophet, and the next morning they sit beside you.” Then he would add, “Have I delivered the message?”

He inclined toward Shiʿism, so complaints were filed to stop him from preaching. Permission was later restored, yet Ibn al-ʿAbbādī had by then appeared and many people favoured him. Sultan Masʿūd treated him with great honour and attended his gatherings, but when the sultan died al-Ghaznawī was abased and grievously humiliated; he fell ill and died in Muḥarram of this year.

Ibn al-Jawzi said: “It reached me that in his death-throes he would perspire, then regain consciousness and say, ‘Contentment and submission.’ When he died he was buried in the ribāṭ where he had resided.”

Mahmūd ibn Ismāʿīl ibn Qādūs, Abū al-Fath al-Dimyāṭī⦗2⦘

He served as chancery secretary in Egypt and taught al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, who called him “the master of the two eloquences.” Al-ʿImād the scribe mentioned him in al-Kharīdah⦗3⦘ and praised him. Among his verses about the man who keeps repeating the takbīr, obsessing over his intention at the start of prayer⦗4⦘—in the Sarīʿ metre⦗5⦘—are:

Of the limp-willed whose resolve is impotent, with endless trembling and shaking,⦗6⦘
He pronounces the takbīr seventy times in one go, as though he were praying the funeral prayer for Ḥamzah.⦗7⦘