“Time is a sword: if you do not cut it, it will cut you.”

Al-Shafi‘i said he kept company with the Sufis and took only two things from them: “time is a sword — if you do not cut it, it cuts you,” and “your self, if you do not occupy it with the truth, will occupy you with falsehood.” Ibn al-Qayyim reports it in this form in al-Jawab al-Kafi and adds that a person’s time is, in reality, his life. Al-Bayhaqi gives al-Shafi‘i’s words with a chain, and in his version the first saying is simply “time is a sword.”