“Nature exists for man to exploit for his own ends, while the end of man himself is nothing else but to serve God, to be grateful to Him, and to worship Him alone.”

“The purpose of man's creation is that he do good in the world, not substitutehimself for God and think that he can make and unmake the moral law at his ownconvenience and for his own selfish and narrow ends. This is the difference betweenphysical laws and the moral law—the one is to be used and put to service; the othermust be obeyed and served. For God says”

“the Qur’ān appears to be interested in three types knowledge for man. One is the knowledge of nature which has been made subservient to man, i.e., the physical sciences. The second crucial type is the knowledge of history (and geography): the Qur’ān persistently asks man to "travel on the earth" and see for himself what happened to bygone civilizations and why they rose and fell. The third is the knowledge of man himself.”

“Empirical" knowledge itself is of little benefit unless it awakens the inner perception of man as to his own situation, his potentialities, his risks, and his destiny”

“All evil, all injustice, all harm that one does to someone else—in sum, all deviation from man's normative nature—in a much more fundamental way and in a far more ultimate sense one does to oneself, and not just metaphorically but literally.”

“The Qur’ān definitely seems optimistic about the future, while rather grim about the past It is absolutely imperative for successor civilizations and their bearer communities to study well and learn from the fate of earlier ones that have perished; or they will assuredly meet with the same fate, for "God's law does not change" for any people. This is perhaps one of the most insistent ideas in the Qur’ān, which constantly exhorts people to "travel on the earth and see the end of those before them”

“People belittle or ignore or even rebel against God, because they view theprocesses of nature as having self-sufficient causes, normally regarded by them asultimate. They do not realize that the universe is a sign pointing to something"beyond" itself, something without which the universe, with all its natural causes,would be and could be nothing.”