Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.

You must empty out the dirty water before you fill the pitcher with clean.

The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.

Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.

Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.

The impatient man is his own enemy; he slams the door on his own progress.