Feisal Abdul Rauf Quotes

Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

When you locate good in yourself, approve of it with determination. When you locate evil in yourself, despise it as something detestable.

The test of progress is the amount of renunciation that one has attained.

The whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place. People are doing it around you all the time. They give up their careers, say - or their beliefs - or sex.

Victory in physical battles requires strength, muscles, and skill; but the fight is never tougher and victory is never sweeter than in the battles over self.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

Instead of looking outside of ourselves and counting potential enemies, fasting summons us to turn our glance inward, and to take the measure of our greatest challenge: the self, the ego, in our own eyes and as others see us.

Why cannot we correct the baneful passions, without weakening the good?

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

I practice martial arts not to win over other people but to win over my own heart.

Every day, we have to strive to be better people. Some days we give in to weakness, and sometimes we give in to strength.

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

I have to say that the most important thing Scientology has given me is the ability to keep my integrity together.

Evil is an attack against human spiritual development and enlightenment. All evil, badness, neurosis - it has one motive and one motive only, which is to destroy - to destroy your chance of arising above yourself.

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

The greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego's destructive and negative emotions and thoughts... which prevent us from attaining perfection.

Brother, stand the pain. Escape the poison of your impulses. The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do. Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. That way a thorn expands to a rose.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.

Happie is hee that chastens himselfe.

The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.

The highest strength is acquired not in overcoming the world, but in overcoming one's self. Learn to be cruel to thyself, to withstand thy appetites, to bear thy sufferings, and thou shalt become free and able.

Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.