Abdullah Ali Khan

We do not love the past because it was better but because it is finished, because its beauties and its disasters have already revealed their size and can no longer surprise us, because the dead cannot disappoint us further and the younger version of ourselves, preserved now in memory, will never again do anything embarrassing.

…faith is not the acceptance of a well-evidenced proposition but the orientation of the whole self toward something it cannot fully see and chooses, in full awareness of the risk, to move toward anyway. […] trying to prove God objectively is not the path to faith but, in the most precise sense, its destruction, for the mathematically certain man has no need of trust, and without trust there is no relation. […] God was never meant to be an object of proof but an object of love, which is always, by its nature, a subjective and agonising and entirely personal risk.

…the sum of these accumulated parts amounts to nothing fixed, but resolves into zero, a grand nullification, and yet, I speak of myself in reference to my 'self' as though I am fully aware of what it is, or of what I am. Nay, I find that what I am inclined to call my most authentic self is only that which remains most obscure, most distant, most diluted, and that which is nearest to me in experience proves least graspable in reflection.