“Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.”

“How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?”

“How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry. If you can't think of anything else.”

“It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world first among them) can enjoy no definitive justification. Its demands always exceed, immeasurably, its grounds for making them. It says, “Follow me.” It can never give a conclusive reason to do so. All that it can do is to make an incomplete argument and a defeasible appeal. It cannot escape the circularity in all our large-scale transformative projects: for better or worse, each of them is a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. If it is embraced and it works, it remakes part of experience in its image.”

“Lust is temporary, romance can be nice, but love is the most important thing of all. Because without Love, lust and romance will always be short-lived.”

“How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.”

“You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing mindful breathing. You should not allow yourself to get lost in action. Action should be meditation at the same time.”

“Negative desires can cause no evil if you do not allow yourself to be seduced by them.”

“The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm, work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are opposed neither by care nor labor.”

“I have no sense of why I lost my freedom and if you do not know how you lost something, how can you protect it?”