The best thing for you, my children, is to serve God from your heart without falsehood or deception, not giving out to people that you are one thing while, God forbid, in your heart you are another. Say your prayers with awe and devotion
Glückel of Hameln, Memoirs (1692)
It is not God we’re missing. It is the awareness of God in the commonness of life that we fail to cultivate.
Joan Chittister, OSB Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair
Abraham Joshua Heschel
On Chochma/Wisdom: Although She is one, She does all things. Without leaving Herself She renews all things. Generation after generation She slips into holy souls, making them friends of God, and prophets, for God loves none more than they who dwell with Wisdom
Wisdom of Solomon 7:27-28
Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The love of God is not only the highest form of love, but also in reality the only love of which all other loves are but shadows
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Love of God: The Bridge Between Him, You, and Us,” A Common Word p.116
As regards the Qur’anic basis for the assertion that God is inherently and overwhelming loving, one should focus first of all on the two names for mercy: al-Rahman and al-Rahim…Just as love is the inherent, defining reality of charity, so rahma is to be understood primarily in terms of a love that gives of itself: what it gives is what it is, transcendent beatitude..
Reza Shah-Kazemi, “God, ‘The Loving’,” A Common Word p.103
Significant agreement on love of God and neighbor does not erase…undeniable, deep, and consequential differences. What agreement on love of God and neighbor does is this: It enables those of deep faith to respect and protect others despite these differences, it leads them to get to know each other in their differences, and it helps them live together harmoniously notwithstanding their differences.
Miroslav Volf, “A Common Word for A Common Future” A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor p. 20
I love God: I have no time left
In which to hate the devil.
Rabi’a
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.
