The one who is [truly] imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.
Ibn TaymiyyahRead
Remembrance is to the heart what water is to the fish. And what is the state of a fish that leaves water?
Interpretation
Remembrance is vital for emotional well-being, just as water is essential for a fish's survival.
This quote by Ibn Taymiyyah highlights the importance of remembrance in nurturing the heart and soul. Just as fish cannot survive outside of water, human beings struggle emotionally when they lose the practice of remembrance, which serves as nourishment for our inner lives and emotional health.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say, 'As Ibn Taymiyyah wisely noted, remembrance is to the heart what water is to the fish.'
The one who is [truly] imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him.
The sign of the people of bidβah is that they do not follow the salaf.
Whatever is not done by the permission of Allah will not happen, and what is not done for the sake of Allah will not benefit or remain.
The more humble, needy, and subdued you are before Allah, the closer you will be to Him.
If you do good in secret, Allah will shower His good on you in public.
Make tawba not just for sins you've committed, but also for obligations you haven't fulfilled.
It is much more valuable to look for the strength in others. You can gain nothing by criticizing their imperfections.
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
As a human being, I'm concerned about the world that I live in. So, I'm concerned about peace. I'm concerned about - about man's inhumanity to man. I'm concerned about the environment.
I believe we create our own lives. And we create it by our thinking, feeling patterns in our belief system. I think we're all born with this huge canvas in front of us and the paintbrushes and the paint, and we choose what to put on this canvas.
For, in truth, an image is only dead matter shaped by the craftsman's hand. But we have no sensible image of sensible matter, but an image that is perceived by the mind alone: God, who alone is truly God.
Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.
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