Excerpts from Beads of Dew:

With every breath a person breathes, a treasure is wasted and lost. It is necessary to recognize, with every breath, that Allah is Present and Watchful. When this awareness takes control, the sense of humble modesty is felt in Allah’s presence, and heedlessness departs.

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The devil [shaitan] is twofold: concrete and abstract. The concrete devil is the one known as Iblis, while the abstract devil is the lower self [nafs]. The abstract devil does certain things the concrete devil cannot do. For instance, while the concrete devil teaches good deeds to the human being, intending to make him renounce them later, the abstract devil resorts directly to the greatest evil, using goodness as a pretext. He acknowledges the Prophetic tradition concerning the reward due to those who observe the fine practices of Allah’s Messenger, and to those who disseminate them, then he plays the trick of citing invented traditions. Satan himself is not capable of going to this length. To give another example, the concrete devil teaches the human being to recite the Quran in a loud voice, and envisages various pitfalls in this. As for the lower self, which is the abstract devil, it converts this teaching into the bad morality of the hypocrite, who makes a public show of his Quranic recitation, in his passionate desire to gain a good repuation. And so on, and so forth….