"If we learn the most by our mistakes the wise have the most failures. While the timid and unfailing will always be missing true knowledge and perspective."

"The tree (of Islam) is of artificial planting. Instead of containing within itself the germ of growth and adaptation to the various requirements of time and clime and circumstance, expanding with the genial sunshine and rain from heaven, it remains the same forced and stunted thing as when first planted some twelve centuries ago."

"Just as the way sun is behind the moon’s light reflection, I know that everything which comes into my life, or every thing I notice, I see, I hear, has a story behind it. And that story connects it to me. So I become curious to know these back stories. And the more I know them, the more I know myself, each time in a different way."

"What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river."