Imam Ali’s Sayings on This World Part 3
The most felicitous of all people is one who abandons the perishing pleasures [of this world] for the lasting pleasures [of the Hereafter].
The happiest of all people with this world is the one who abandons it and the happiest of them with the Hereafter is the one who works for it.
Verily the interior of this world is dead and its exterior is sick.
Verily today there is action without accounting and tomorrow [in the Hereafter] there is accounting without action.
Verily the seriousness of this world is jest, its honour is disgrace and its height is lowliness.
Verily this world is the abode of troubles, plague, termination and transition; its pleasures do not equal its displeasures, its fortunes do not equate to its misfortunes and its risings do not substitute its collapses.
Verily the one who sells the Garden of the [permanent] Abode for this transient world, his effort will be futile and his transaction will have made a loss.
Verily this world is passing you by in its normal fashion, and you are connected to the Hereafter.
Verily this world is the corruptor of faith and the dispossessor of certitude; it is the source of [all ] troubles and root of tribulations.
Indeed the similitude of this world and the Hereafter is like a man who has two wives, when he pleases one of them he angers the other.
Verily the one whom this world has deceived through unfeasible aspirations and cheated with false hopes is made to lise his eyesight and get covered by blindness, and it cuts him off from the Hereafter and makes him enter into places of destruction.
Verily Alla, the Glorified, has an angel who calls out every day: "O people of the world, procreate for death, construct for destruction and gather up for departure1"
Verily those who are pleased with this world tomorrow are the ones who run away from it today.
Verily the one who is more possessive of this world than of the Hereafter and is more overwhelmed by the affairs of this world than those of the next, has sold the everlasting for the transient and has exchanged the eternal for the temporal; he has destroyed his soul and has accepted for it the perishing and short-lived while causing it to deviate from the clear path [of guidance].
Verily this world is the abode of pain, annihilation, vicissitudes and lessons and the place of trials and tribulations.
Verily this world is he abode of adversities, one who is hastened in it [and dies earlier] suffers the agony [of death] himself, and one who is granted respite in it suffers the pain [of losing] his loved ones.
