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To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

Charity bestowed upon those who are worthy of it is like good seed sown on a good soil that yields an abundance of fruits. But alms given to those who are yet under the tyrannical yoke of the passions are like seed deposited in a bad soil. The passions of the receiver of the alms choke, as it were, the growth of merits.

Those who enjoy their own emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse to do likewise, and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate them.

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

It is not every man who can be exquisitely miserable, any more than exquisitely happy.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.