“Our risk is our cure.”

“If we know for certain that God sees all we do and all we are, we will not be tempted ask others to validate us by displaying our virtues, nor will we tempt others to judge us by displaying our sins. Only God can validate us; only God can judge.”

“If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.”

“the word shari’ah literally means ‘a path that leads to water.’ Even the dire warnings that appear in the Qur‘an are essentially nothing but the protective words of a Friend who doesn’t want to see us lose our way and come to grief.”

“All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.”

“If we have forgotten our total dependency upon God, then there is nothing left for us but to try to depend upon other people’s attention to us, because without such attention we don’t even feel like human beings. Instead of paying attention to God, we become beggars for the attention of others, constantly trying to make them pity us or look up to us. But this is not true human relatedness, only mutual idolatry.”

“Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event.”