النصيحةُ سهلٌ ، والمشكلُ قَبولُها ؛ لأَّنها في مَذاقِ متَّبِعي الهوى مرّّ ؛ إذِ المَناهي محبوبةٌ في قلوبِهِم على الخصوصِ مَنْ كان َطالبَ العلمِ الرسميِّ ،مشتغلَ فضلِ النفسِ ومناقبِ… - Al-Ghazali

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.

The first step to self-knowledge is to know that thou art composed of an outward shape, called the body, and an inward entity called the heart, or soul.

a unity of three separate relationships: (1) our relationship with others, nature and the universe; (2) our relationship with God; (3) our relationship with our “self.“ These relationships are not alien to one another; there are no boundaries between them. They move in the same direction.