Quotes from Seyyed Hossein Nasr

In traditional societies, nature was seen as one's wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute.

To be modern is to destroy nature.

All Muslims stand before God and they are their own priests.

Why does one need a doctor if God has given us our body and we pray to Him for our help?

Rumi is one of the great spokesmen for the Quranic instruction teaching that all prophets come from God and God does not create one religion, but many religions.

The Prophet was taken by the order of God to heaven, which is a prototype of all spiritual realization in Islam. But, he had a guide; Gabriel, the angel, was his guide. He took him to heaven.

One of the greatest problems of humanity is how to live in a multi religious society without losing one's religion - without relativising everything.

The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life.

The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.

The Shariah has many other functions but also protects the tarqiah; it protects the spiritual path.

Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.

A famous poem of Sa'd? states: The children of Adam are members of a single body, For from the moment of creation they were made of one substance. When fate causes pain in any member, The other members cannot remain still. O thou who hath no sorrow in seeing the sorrow of others, Thou art not worthy of being called a human being.

Tradition looks at a traditional civilization as a tree. The root of the tree is permanent and firm in the ground of revelation, but the branches grow in different seasons and in different directions. Tradition does not deny the fact that if you have a harsh and dry winter, the next spring you have fewer flowers and that if you have a winter with more agreeable conditions, you will have more flowers.

When man penetrates the mysteries of Nature, the "facts of Nature" become transparent symbols, revealing the "divine energies" and the "angelic" state which fallen man has lost, and which he may recover only for a moment, as when he is enraptured by the beauty of music or of a lovely face. At such moments man forgets his limited self, his individualistic dream, and participates in the cosmic dream, thus becoming freed from the prison of his own carnal soul.

Let me also again emphasize that it is only within Islam that Sufism can be practiced. The two have never been separated from each other in their reality and in fact are inwardly one, and certainly they have never been separated for me throughout my life.

Man, in the traditional sense of the term corresponding to ins?n in Arabic or homo in Greek and not solely the male, is seen in Islam not as a sinful being to whom the message of Heaven is sent to heal the wound of the original sin, but as a being who still carries his primordial nature (al-fitrah) within himself, although he has forgotten that nature now buried deep under layers of negligence.

Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth; and the variation of the night and the day; and the ships that run upon the sea with what benefits mankind; and the water God sends down from the sky whereby He revives the earth after its death, scattering all manner of beast therein; and the shifting of the winds; and the clouds subdued between the sky and the earth are surely signs for a people who understand.

The Arab conquest was not only a matter of military domination. It was not like the Mongol invasion. The Mongols invaded Iran, but Iran did not become Shamanist or Buddhist. Some people say that the Arab invasion was just a military conquest, but this is not so. Rather, it was accompanied by a profound spiritual transformation that took place wherever Muslims went and settled down.

The gnostic is Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no separate individual existence of his own. He is like the birds and the flowers in his yielding to the Creator; like them, like all the elements of the cosmos, he reflects the Divine to his own degree. He reflects it actively, however, they passively; his participation is a conscious one.

Each decade absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade.

The order of the Universe is identified with the Divine Mind, and the scientist is said to be discovering the mind of God in his scientific pursuits. Scientific method itself has been called a Christian method of discovering God's mind.

Japan has more specialists of Immanuel Kant than Germany does [RIS 2016 Lecture on A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World]

Now this process, which requires death to our "selves" and the piercing of the walls of our ego to penetrate into our heart, is not possible without the spiritual master, who already knows what it means to be fully human and who has realized this knowledge himself or herself through journeying across the mountains and valleys of microcosmic existence to reach the One.