Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

“Alchemy of Happiness”

“Yet perhaps the greatest thing about al-Ghazālī was his personality, and it may yet again be a source of inspiration.”

“Al-Ghazālī has sometimes been acclaimed in both East and West as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad.”

“Islam is now wrestling with Western thought as it once wrestled with Greek philosophy, and is as much in need as it was then of a 'revival of the religious sciences'. Deep study of al-Ghazālī may suggest to Muslims steps to be taken if they are to deal successfully with the contemporary situation. Christians, too, now that the world is in a cultural melting-pot, must be prepared to learn from Islam, and are unlikely to find a more sympathetic guide than al-Ghazālī.”

“If an orthodox author like al-Ghazali wrote a treatise against the Batinis, he was attacking their theological and propaedeutic doctrines but not all of their sciences”

“The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.”

“The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon's cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping glass does not essentially alter the honey. The natural aversion from it in such a case rests on popular ignorance, arising from the fact that the cupping-glass is made only for impure blood. Men imagine that the blood is impure because it is in the cupping-glass, and are not aware that the impurity is due to a property.”

“Do not know the truth by the men, but know the truth, and then you will know who are truthful.”

“A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences.”

“[K]nowledge that is not Infallible is not certain knowledge.”

“There is the world for you. Beauty, true beauty, is intangible. It is in the eye of the beholder. Something that we can lose at any moment, and the more you examine it, the more illusive it becomes. True happiness is virtue, and virtue is predicated on knowledge and righteous conduct.”

“if man’s love for himself be necessary, then his love for Him through whom, first his coming-to-be, and second, his continuance in his essential being with all his inward and outward traits, his substance and his accidents, occur must also be necessary. Whoever is so besotted by his fleshy appetites as to lack this love neglects his Lord and Creator. He possesses no authentic knowledge of Him; his gaze is limited to his cravings and to things of sense.”

“For those endowed with insight there is in reality no object of love but God, nor does anyone but He deserve love”

“How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?”

“The man who makes his religion a means to the gaining of this world, will lose both worlds alike; whereas the man who gives up this world for the sake of religion, will get both worlds alike.”