By Fethullah Gülen — 2019
God gave humankind reason and heart so we can discover and understand the inner truths of existence.
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CLEAR ALL
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
3
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
'Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
In the classic The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society.