523 – Al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān narrated: A certain sage once said:

“Have you not tested this world? It has never stopped rebuking you with harshness and subjecting you to humiliation. Each day it burdens you with a new concern and a sorrow already poised to strike. You trusted in hope, and it deceived you; you obeyed your passions, and they destroyed you. So how, may Allah have mercy on you, will you flee from this death whose realities you do not even know—though they are the very things most certain to be?

Terror confronts you on two fronts: first, the sudden assaults of death that may seize you in whatever condition you are; second, the unmistakable causes you can see with your own eyes—your gradual diminishment: weakness after strength, decline after freshness, old age after youth, and illness after health. Every day a part of your body dies, announcing your own demise and proclaiming your extinction, until death bursts upon you with the bitterness of its cup and the horror of its taste. Then you become hostages of death, entrusted to the earth’s pits until the Day of the appointed time.”