Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes

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  • Professor
  • born 1933
  • 68 quotes

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor (born 1933), is quoted 68 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Spiritual, Islamic, World and Religious.

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Love is loss combined with pain.

To be modern is to destroy nature.

Justice is inseparable from truth in human life.

All Muslims stand before God and they are their own priests.

Why does one need a doctor if God has given us our body and we pray to Him for our help?

Without Sufism, Islam would not have spread into two thirds of what we call the Islamic world.

If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love.

The Shariah has many other functions but also protects the tarqiah; it protects the spiritual path.

In traditional societies, nature was seen as one’s wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute.

Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love.

Sufism has always had the function of purifying Islamic ethics and that fasting and tazkiya is like lighting a lamp.

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

The quest for truth must be carried out by each person individually. It is like breathing, something which no one else can do for us.

The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.

The Prophet, peace be on him, presents all the possibilities of the human state in perfection. Now, a part of that of course is love of God.

One of the greatest problems of humanity is how to live in a multi religious society without losing one's religion - without relativising everything.

Only man can stop being fully man. He can ascend above all degres of universal existence and by the same token fall below the level of the basest of creatures.

Rumi is one of the great spokesmen for the Quranic instruction teaching that all prophets come from God and God does not create one religion, but many religions.

I wish someone could get rid of individuality so easily; one never gets rid of one's individuality completely. One gets rid of one's egotism, which is a very different matter.

The Islamic world doesn't stop in the Arab world or Persia. There is the whole Turkic world, the Central Asian world, South Asian world, Southeast Asian world, and African world.

The Prophet was taken by the order of God to heaven, which is a prototype of all spiritual realization in Islam. But, he had a guide; Gabriel, the angel, was his guide. He took him to heaven.

The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life.

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.

Yearning is inseparable from love, and since once doesn't have the object of love immediately, one has not fallen in the embrace of the beloved immediately, they are suffering. That's how they are related.

Islam, in contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, does not have monasticism; spiritual life, social life, they are all integrated and related together in one way or another. And the Prophet represents that in his life.

The word Habib in Arabic means both lover and beloved. At the heart of it is that the Prophet loves God, God loves him. But God designated him to be also the founder of a new world order of a civilization of a society.

Spiritual guidance needs guidance. It's like comparing walking on the ground and mountain climbing. Once you learn how to walk, you can walk on the ground by yourself, but if you want to climb Mount Everest, you need a guide.

Tariqah [The Spiritual Path] without the Sharia [Islamic Law] is like having a pistachio tree without the shell. Or a walnut, a walnut cannot grow on a tree without having a shell, and the food that you eat is inside the shell.

At all costs we should avoid considering our love of God to be superior to the love of the other for GodLet us love God and leave it for Him to decide on the intensity and sincerity of our loves, as well as of our differing views of Him

The Bin Ladens must not be confused with authentic jihad - it's quite something else. If you want an example of external jihad, you should cite Amir Abd al Qadir who fought against the French in the 19th century, which was quite something else.

Once you've fallen in love, it's turned around your whole life. You keep thinking about this girl all the time instead of thinking about other things. Since the object of love is that particular person, being separated brings about a longing and pain.

The Quran explicitly opposes the killing of innocent people and the Prophet was always careful in doing that. If they had to fight a war, he was always on the side of peace as soon as it was possible to make peace because that's what the Quran says also.

In fact, the machine doesn't have the consciousness we have, the free will that we have, and to surrender one's free will, not in every matter but in spiritual matters, to a spiritual teacher is in a sense a lower level of surrendering one's will to God.

There are millions and millions of Sufis who have existed in Islamic history and have the deepest impact on every aspect of Islamic culture and civilization to philosophy to art to science to social structure to economics who have not met the destiny of al-Hallaj.

Many people have criticized Islam for being just automatic, having no individuality, just surrendering your will to God, but we Muslims know very well that every moment of the day we have to practice the fact that to surrender one's self to God is an act of free will.

The Islamic world is suffering not only because of external oppression but also because of the loss of its own dignity, of its own heritage, of its own practice of Islam, of its weakening of its own ethics, and many things which are internal to Islam not just external.

In fact many Hindu yogis and Sufis met, they became friends, they spoke about the knowledge and love of God; about all the similarities that exist. And then the simplicity of Islam, the fact these people practiced what they preached brought many, many Hindus into Islam.

Rumi is perhaps the greatest mystical poet who ever lived, one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. He was able to express practically all aspects of the spiritual life and our existential situation in the world today as human beings in beautiful Persian poetry.

What does a lamp do? The lamp is like a horse that is running but stays put. But by virtue of being a lamp it illuminates the space around it. Therefore, the practice of purifying one's soul, of living virtuously, has tremendous impacts upon the ethics of the surrounding society.

Militarily, the great movements of resistance against colonial powers in the 18th and 19th century were almost all from Sufis: Imam Shamil in Caucasia, Amir Abd al Qadir in Algeria, The Barelvi family in the modern province of India, today which is Pakistan, and you can go down the line.

In the same way that we have a body and a soul and a spirit, our soul can't walk in the street without our body - we would be dead then. Religion is the same way; it has to have a body, it has to have a form, it has to have structure. Without that, the soul cannot be prepared to follow the tariqah.

People who were also traders were also men of Sufism, as we see around Java, people who were outwardly trading but were also men of very high spiritual character. Otherwise no trader would be able to convert a person from one religion to another. It was because they were men of spiritual character.

Muhammad sets the model for being a good statesman. He also sets the model for being a good warrior, for chivalry, of nobility, of all the things which the Quran and Hadith [The recorded collections of the sayings and traditions of the Prophet] says of treating your enemy with dignity and kindness.

In Islam, there is no priesthood and each person stands before God, like in the daily prayers, without an intermediary. That's in contrast to Christianity, where during the Eucharist, a priest has to officiate and the priest functions as a link - at least in Catholic Christianity - between the laity and God.

In Islam, we believe that it is God himself who is the ultimate guide - Al Hadi - one of the names of God is Al Hadi, the Guide. But at the same time, God has provided within the Islamic revelation the possibility of spiritual guidance through human beings, because then everyone can have direct access to God.

Only in the West did a philosophy develop that was not only no longer the love of wisdom but went so far as to deny the category of wisdom as a legitimate form of knowledge. The result was a hatred of wisdom that should more appropriately be called ‘misosophy’ (literarily hatred of Sophia, Wisdom) rather than philosophy.

If you want to make a decision in life on what to do, but if you're trying systematically, through spiritual practice, through meditation, through the invocation of the name of God, to walk closer and closer in this life to Him, you need someone to guide you. And God has made it possible in Islam for this guidance to exist.

The life of Islamic philosophy did not terminate with Ibn Rushd nearly eight hundred years ago, as thought by Western scholarship for several centuries. Rather, its activities continued strongly during the later centuries, particularly in Persia and other eastern lands of Islam, and it was revived in Egypt during the last century.

Jalaluddin Rumi is completely rooted in Islamic teachings of Quran. He was a great scholar, he belonged to a madrassa, and he knew Islamic theology and jurisprudence very well. He knew Persian, Arabic and Turkish, which was coming into Anatolia at that time, very well. He was a remarkable, remarkable scholar, besides being a great saint.

When one talks about being like a dead corpse in the hands of a spiritual teacher it means being able to surrender one's will, specially one's nafs al ammarah, that is a part of our soul which is again a Quranic term, which commands us to evil - we must surrender that. That's what it means. It doesn't make you become part of a cog of a machine.

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