Corbin said to me one time, “What is wrong with the Islamic world is that it has destroyed its images, and without these images that are so rich in its tradition, they are going crazy because they have no containers for their extraordinary imaginative power.”

When feeling is undeveloped, then the world is awash in emotions, which manifest the natural powers of the world undifferentiated by consciousness. Emotions are the un-felt energies of things.

More often the Angel appears to us in our communication, our communion, with other people. We have to learn to listen to people.

Perhaps it is better to say that something has to become present.

For Corbin prayer is not a request for anything but the expression, as he says, of a mode of being ‒ one which is open to mystery.

nothing is literal – nothing is only what it seems on the surface. Everything has depth, breadth, and extended reference.

The idea of ta’wīl, or spiritual hermeneutics is, he says, the central principle in all spiritual disciplines

It presumes and mirrors one of the fundamental dichotomies that characterizes the Western rationalist world view ‒ that between thought and things.

You have to be able to suspend your own viewpoint, and your own emotional reactions.