When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

People talk about ‘service, effort, love, knowledge’. But with knowledge you know what love is, and what it is not.

A Sufi has a right to be served, but he has no right to demand. Maruf Karkhi of Khorasan

Make mankind your dwelling place.

You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.

If you do not understand, you cannot love. You can only imagine that you love.

Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.

The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.

There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.