“I am happy, and I think full of an energy, an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions… A Sufi leader teaches his students to regard all the negativity in their lives as a gift from God, to observe and ask, ‘What is there in this that returns to me because it comes from me?'”

—William Butler Yeats, in his final letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham.