Muhammad says, ‘Love of one’s country is a part of the faith.’ But don’t take that literally! Your real ‘country’ is where you’re heading, not where you are. Don’t misread that hadith.
Your real “country” is where you’re heading, not where you are.
In real existence there is only unity.
If your knowledge of fire has been turned to certainty by words alone, then seek to be cooked by the fire itself. Don’t abide in borrowed certainty. There is no real certainty until you burn; if you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
Whatever you know, or don’t – only Love is real.
Students of cunning have consumed their hearts and learned only tricks; they’ve thrown away real riches: patience, self-sacrifice, generosity. Rich thought opens the way.
No one looks back and regrets leaving this world. What’s regretted is how real we thought it was.
Nothing whatever pertaining to godliness and real holiness can be accomplished without grace .
Salvation is God’s way of making us real people.
When I come to be united to thee with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by thee.
Nothing is more real than nothing.
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. ‘Nothing is more real than nothing.’ They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.
I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It’s much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.
All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.
This is personal, she’d said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn’t see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.
There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.
I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. As long as I didn’t say it aloud, it wasn’t real.
Again, it occurred to me how weird it was to be permanent in a place that to everyone else was only temporary. Like I could never be sure if they were the ones who weren’t real, or if I was.
The thing is, you can’t always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.
So maybe it wasn’t the fairy tale. But those stories weren’t real anyway. Mine were.