Quotes from Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The materialistic conception of nature did not go unchallenged during the nineteenth century, particularly in art and literature where the romantic movement sought to re-establish a more intimate bond with nature and the indwelling spirit within nature. The philosophical Romantic poets like Novalis devoted themselves most of all to the theme of nature and its significance for man.

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.

The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart.

The life of Islamic philosophy did not terminate with Ibn Rushd nearly eight hundred years ago, as thought by Western scholarship for several centuries. Rather, its activities continued strongly during the later centuries, particularly in Persia and other eastern lands of Islam, and it was revived in Egypt during the last century.

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity.

The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.

One wonders who knows more about the coyote, the zoologist who is able to study its external habit and dissect its cadaver or the Indian medicine man who identifies himself with the "spirit" of the coyote?

The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.

The compartmentalization of knowledge, which is one of the characteristics of the mental and intellectual scene of the modern world, is not only reflected in modern education but is also caused by it.

Mu?ammad is a man, but not like other men. Rather, he is a ruby and other men are like stones.

To consider Western science simply as a continuation of Islamic science is, therefore, to misunderstand completely both the epistemological foundations of the two sciences and the relationship that each has to the world of faith and revelation. It is also to misunderstand the metaphysical and philosophical backgrounds of the two sciences.

From it genesis twelve hundred years ago to today, Islamic philosophy (al-hikmah; al-falsafah) has been one of the major intellectual traditions within the Islamic world, and it has influenced and been influenced by many other intellectual perspectives, including Scholastic theology (kalam) and doctrinal Sufism (al-ma'rifah or al-tasawwuf al-'ilmi) and theoretical gnosis ('irfan-i nazari).

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.

Furthermore, in the 13th/19th century philosophy began to see itself as a complete replacement for religion as one can see in the rise of the very idea of ideology at that time, a term used widely today even by Muslims who rarely realize the essentially secular and anti-religious character of the very concept of ideology which has gradually come to replace traditional religion in so many circles.

In the Islamic world itself also there is a great crisis in he modern established universities precisely because the systems from the West have been transplanted into that world without a close integration between the humanities, which should be drawn totally from Islamic sources, the religious disciplines and the sciences which have been imported from the West.

Beauty is at once a royal path to God and an impediment to reaching God if it is taken as a god in itself.

The quest for truth must be carried out by each person individually. It is like breathing, something which no one else can do for us.

Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love.

Justice is inseparable from truth in human life.

The Prophet, peace be on him, presents all the possibilities of the human state in perfection. Now, a part of that of course is love of God.

Love is loss combined with pain.

If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love.

Only man can stop being fully man. He can ascend above all degres of universal existence and by the same token fall below the level of the basest of creatures.