The Art of Being & Becoming by Hazrat Inayat Khan

"For attainment on the spiritual path, study is secondary and magical powers are unimportant.  The first and most important principle is the cultivation of the heart quality, and there is only one way to cultivate this quality:  to become more and more selfless at each step that we take"

"The training of the ego is not necessarily a sad life of renunciation, nor is it necessarily the life of a hermit.  The training is to be wise in life, to understand what we desire, why we desire it, and what effect will follow: what we can afford and what we cannot afford."

"If there can be a definition of spirituality. it is the tuning of the heart.  Tuning means the change of pitch of the vibration.  The tuning of the heart means the changes of the vibrations, in order that one may reach a certain pitch that is the natural pitch; then one feels the joy and ecstasy of life, which enables one to give pleasure to others even by one's presence, because one is tuned."

"Hazrat Pir-o Murshid Inayat Khan was born in Baroda, India in 1882 into a family of master musicians.  A lineage-holder in the four major streams of Indian Sufism, he was sent to the West by his teacher Abu Hashim Madani Chisti 'to harmonise East and West' with his music.  Inayat Khan left India in 1910 and for 16 years he lived and taught in Europe and America, bringing a message of love, harmony and beauty that was both the quintessence of Sufi teaching and a revolutionary new approach to the harmonizing of Western and Eastern spirituality.  he established a school of spiritual training based upon traditional Sufi teachings infused with the vision of the unity of religious ideals and the awakening of humanity to the divinity within.  Inayat Khan died in India in 1927, leaving a significant body of recorded discorse and instruction on all things pertaining to spiritual ideals in the midst of life in the world."