Desire makes slaves out of kings, while patience makes kings out of slaves. - Al-Ghazali

"A third group of people see the highest felicity in the abundance of property and the extension of ease. After all, property is an instrument to achieve the object of appetite. Through it, the human being attains the ability to achieve wishes. Hence, these people aspire to gather property; to increase estates, land, valuable horses, cattle, and farmland, and to hoard dinars in the earth. Hence, you will see one of them striving throughout life — - embarking on great dangers in the deserts, on journeys, and in the oceans to gather possessions with which he is niggardly toward himself, to say nothing of others. These are the ones meant by the words of The Prophet: "The slave of the dirham is miserable: the slave of the dinar is miserable." What darkness is greater than that which deceives the human being? Gold and silver are two stones that are not desired in themselves. When wishes are not achieved through them and they are not spent, then they are just like pebbles, and pebbles are just like them."

Some may say that the resources of the world are necessary for men to pass their lives in this world. How can they abstain from using these necessaries of life? It may be noted carefully that whatever has been said about Zuhd (abstinence) pertains to the possession and use of useless and superfluous things of life. The practice of Zuhd has been advised about things which are not indispensable for life in this world. None can advise against using things which are necessary to maintain health so necessary for keeping body and soul together and for devotion and worship in the path of Exalted Allah.

O youth.......be assured that knowledge alone does not strengthen the hand......Though a man read a hundred thousand scientific questions and understood them or learned them, but did not work with them — -They do not benefit him except by working.....Knowledge is the tree, and working is its fruit; and though you studied a hundred years and assembled a thousand books, you would not be prepared for the mercy of Allah the Exalted except by working.