The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

The parents have to learn that the child should not be insulted, humiliated, condemned. If you want to help him, love him more. Appreciate what is good in him rather than emphasizing what is bad. Talk about his goodness. Let the whole neighborhood know how nice and beautiful a boy he is. You may be able to shift his energy from the bad side to the good side, from the dark side to the lighted side, because you will make him aware that this is the way to get respect, this is the way to be honored. And you will prevent him from doing anything that makes him fall down in people's eyes.

I want to be taken playfully, not seriously - not with a long British face, but with beautiful laughter. Your laughter, your playfulness is the recognition that you have understood me. Your seriousness shows that you have misunderstood me, you have missed it - because seriousness is nothing but sickness. It is another name of sadness; it is a shadow of death. And I am all for life. If it is needed for your laughter, your dance, even to reject me, then reject me - but don't reject the dance and the song and the life, because that is my teaching.

Tonight go to sleep as though your whole past has been dropped. Die to the past. And in the morning wake up as a new man in a new morning. Don't let the same one who went to bed get up. Let him go to sleep for good. Let the one who is ever-new and ever-fresh awake instead.

Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.

Real music will help you move towards meditation, beyond the mind needs, towards spiritual needs. Real poetry will give you a glimpse of the minds of the sages - a glimpse of course. It will open a window so you can see the faraway distant Himalayas. And then an urge arises in you, and you start travelling.

If you try to become a buddha, one thing is certain - you will not be able to become yourself. One thing only is certain - that you will not be yourself. And then follows the next thing: you can never be a buddha, because you are you and a buddha is buddha. If you try to become a buddha, you cannot be a buddha; at the most you can be an imitation - a plastic flower, not a real rose.

The real religion is not imitation of anybody else, it is a search to find out your own authentic self, who you are.

Real music will make you more and more refined. It will become more and more silent. In fact, real music will help you to listen to silence, where all notes disappear, where only gaps remain. One note comes, disappears, and another has not come, and there is a gap. In that gap meditation flows in you.

For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.

Watching them opens your inner being. Just watching them opens your inner eye and that is the real eye; the outside eyes are of not much use. You are fortunate that you don't have them. You are blessed! Blessed are the blind for they shall not be forced to see this ugly world! And it is really ugly - believe me!

It is only through meditation that purity comes. Meditation means jumping out of the mind. There is no need to purify the mind, it can be put aside. One can become disidentified with the mind. To know "I am not the mind," is real purity because then you are only consciousness, awareness, a witnessing. To live twenty-four hours a day as a witness is the way of the sannyasin.

So meditation is not really mind-effort. Real meditation is not effort at all. Real meditation is just allowing the mind to have its own way, and not interfering in any way whatsoever - just remaining watchful, witnessing. It silences, by and by, it becomes still. One day it is gone. You are left alone.

I always knew looking back on my tears would bring me laughter, but I never knew looking back on my laughter would make me cry.

Everything I do is for the pleasure of Allah.

To be what you want to be, you must give up being what you are.

When many astronauts go to space, they see the insignificant size of the earth and vastness of space, and they become very religious, because they have seen the Signs of Allah.

There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.

There are certain comforts of living here in Dubai, the comforts of so many mosques and so much good food... It's just that much more secure. And may God keep it safe.

I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after.

I became a vegetarian, and I carried around a suitcase full of vitamins and special drinks everywhere I went.

I suppose that by being absent from the music business, it appeared that I just dropped out, but really I never did. I was continuously working and doing various things.

Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.

'Peace Train' is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways to be, you know that there are.

It's very difficult to ignore humanitarian disasters. The royalties from my albums continue to support my charity work.

One song I do is 'The First Cut is the Deepest.' I try to remind people I wrote that song, not Rod Stewart.

The greatest legacy is that which benefits the widest number of people for the longest period without limit to value. No one but the Prophet Muhammad was given that role as the seal of God's message.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

A person who steals bread during a famine is not treated as a thief.

The very first lesson that I learnt from the Qur'an was the message of unity and peace.

All things can be forgiven if we can progress.

My imam at the Central Mosque said there was no problem with making music. In fact, he encouraged me - he said if the songs are moral, not offensive, then go ahead.

This is the beauty of the Qur'an: it asks you to reflect and reason, and not to worship the sun or moon but the One who has created everything. The Qur'an asks man to reflect upon the sun and moon and God's creation in general.

Muslims have been subjected to so many tyrants and oppressive regimes. That's what the Arab Spring was about, but the problem comes in trying to direct a revolution.

Man is created to be God's deputy on earth and it is important to realize the obligation to rid ourselves of all illusions and to make our lives a preparation for the next life.

I did not come into contact with any Muslim before I embraced Islam. I read the Qur'an first and realized no person is perfect, Islam is perfect, and if we imitate the conduct of the Holy Prophet... we will be successful.

The theatre is a world in itself. The possibility for creating experiences that move people is increased many times over. In the end, the best stories are usually about a battle of good over evil - that has never changed.

I was brought up in the modern world of all the luxury and the highlight of show business. I was born into a Christian home.

I grew up in the West End, so my whole background was living among theatres and musicals and the West End's coffee bars and clubs. It's kind of obvious that one day I should do something like that.

I've returned to being an amateur without any ties or strings attached, which gives me a freedom I never had before.

Though times have changed, it's a nice surprise to see that youthful feeling of anti-war sentiment returning once more to the cobbled main streets of Europe.

Communal well-being is central to human life.

A lot of people would have loved me to keep singing... You come to a point where you have sung, more or less... your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living.

There was no division I could see between the essential teaching of all Prophets and wise men of religion.

People who want to remember me as Cat Stevens - welcome. Those who want me as Yusuf, you're here.

Violence is almost an everyday occurrence in some Muslim lands: it should not be exacerbated by revenge attacks on more innocent families and communities.

It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I'd been living as a pop star. I was in a different mood.

The words of the songs speak for themselves.

The latest horror to hit the U.S. looks to have been caused by people of Middle Eastern origin, bearing Muslim names. Again, shame. This fuels more hatred for a religion and a people who have nothing to do with these events.