qualities results in the production of corresponding characters, - Al-Ghazali

According to Ibn ‘Abbās, may God be pleased with him and his father, the Prophet David, God bless him and give him peace, used to say in his intimate Prayers: ‘My God, who inhabits Your House? And from whom do you accept the Prayer?’ Then God told him by inspiration: ‘David, he who inhabits My House, and he whose Prayer I accept, is none but he who is humble before My Majesty, spends his days in remembrance of Me and keeps his passions in check for My sake, giving food to the hungry and shelter to the stranger and treating the afflicted with compassion. His light shines in the sky like the sun. If he invokes Me, I am at his service. If he asks of Me, I grant his request. In the midst of ignorance, I give him discernment; in heedlessness, remembrance, in darkness, light. He stands out among ordinary people as Paradise towers over earthly gardens, its rivers inexhaustible and its fruits not subject to decay.

اعلم أن التوبة عبارة عن معنى ينتظم من ثلاثة أمور : علم ، وحال ، وفعل .
فأما العلم فهو معرفة ضرر الذنوب وكونها حجاباً بين العبد وبين كل محبوب ، فإذا وجدت هذه المعرفة ثار منها حال في القلب ، وهي التألم بخوف وفات المحبوب ، وهو الندم ، وباستيلائه يثور إرادة التوبة وتلافي ما مضى ، فالتوبة ترك الذنب في الحال ، والعزم على أن لا يعود ، وتلافي ما مضى ، وقد قال عليه الصلاة والسلام : ( الندم توبة ) ، إذ الندم يكون بعد العلم كما ذكرنا .

If you were to show a piece of intelligible writing to a reasonable person and say to him: 'do you know its writer?' and he said 'no', he would be speaking truly. But if he said 'yes: its writer is a man living and powerful, hearing and seeing, sound of hand and knowledgeable in the practise of writing, and if I know all this from [the sample] how can I not know him?-he too would be speaking truly. Yet the saying of the one who said 'I do not know him' is more correct and true, for in reality he has not known him. Rather he only knows that intelligible writing requires a living writer, knowing, powerful, hearing, and seeing; yet he does not know the writer himself. Similarly, every creature knows only that this ordered and precisely disposed world requires an arranging, living, knowing, and powerful maker.