Abu Huseyn an-Nuri (d. approx. 907 CE)

"I spent twenty years between finding and losing. Here's how: When I found my lord, I lost my heart; and when I found my heart, I lost my lord" [my translation from the Risala of al-Qushayri, Beirut (2005), 62].

Abu Huseyn an-Nuri understood the paradoxical nature of a life lived longing for the Divine--1,000 years before Kierkegaard "discovered" it. This gnomic saying expresses his appreciation of that state of confoundedness in which one wanders on "the path"--the path being nothing other than life itself.