That is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly, possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the comprehension and control of the ordinary human mind. Imagine a tree whose leaves, having no kind of direct knowledge about the root, hold a discussion about whether or not a root exists and what its form is if it does: if a voice then came from the root telling them that the root does exist and what its form is, that message would be sacred. The sacred is the presence of the center in the periphery, of the immutable in the moving; dignity is essentially an expression of it, for in dignity too the center manifests outwardly; the heart is revealed in gestures. The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity. [GTUFS: UIslam, The Quran]

What then is the sacred in relation to the world? It is the interference of the uncreate in the created, of the eternal in time, of the infinite in space, of the supraformal in forms; it is the mysterious introduction into one realm of existence of a presence which in reality contains and transcends that realm and could cause it to burst asunder in a sort of divine explosion. The sacred is the incommensurable, the transcendent, hidden within a fragile form belonging to this world; it has its own precise rules, its terrible aspects and its merciful qualities; moreover any violation of the sacred, even in art, has incalculable repercussions. Intrinsically the sacred is inviolable, and so much so that any attempted violation recoils on the head of the violator. [GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of Art]

Sacred / Sense of the Sacred: The sacred is the projection of the celestial Center into the cosmic periphery, or of the “Motionless Mover” into the flux of things. To feel this concretely is to possess the sense of the sacred, and thereby the instinct of adoration, devotion and submission; the sense of the sacred is the awareness – in the world of that which may or may not be – of That which cannot not be, and whose immense remoteness and miraculous proximity we experience at one and the same time . . . The sense of the sacred is also the innate consciousness of the presence of God: it is to feel this presence sacramentally in symbols and ontologically in all things. Hence the sense of the sacred implies a kind of universal respect, a kind of circumspection before the mystery of animate and inanimate creatures; and this without any favourable prejudice or weakness towards phenomena which manifest errors or vices, and which for that reason no longer present any mystery unless it be that of the absurd. Undoubtedly such phenomena are metaphysically necessary, but they signify precisely an absence of the sacred, and thus they are integrated into our respect for existence in a negative manner and by way of contrast; but apart from this, the pious and contemplative soul feels a natural respect for the things with which nature surrounds us . . . The sacred is the projection of the Immutable into the mutable; as a result, the sense of the sacred consists not only in perceiving this projection, but also in discovering in things the trace of the Immutable, to the point of not letting oneself be deceived and enslaved by the mutable. Thus, one must live the experience of beauty so as to draw from it a lasting, not ephemeral, element, hence realizing in oneself an opening towards the immutable Beauty, rather than plunging oneself into the current of things; it is a question of viewing the world, and living in it, in a manner that is sacred and not profane; or sacralizing and not profanating. This brings us back once again to the mystery of the two aspects of Maya, the one that imprisons and the one that delivers. [GTUFS: DivineHuman, The Sense of the Sacred]

The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect; we insist on legitimacy, for it is a question of respecting, not just anything, but what is worthy of respect; “there is no right superior to that of the truth.” [GTUFS: HaveCenter, Intelligence and Character]

The sense of the sacred, which is none other than the quasi-natural predisposition to the love of God and the sensitivity to theophanic manifestations or to celestial perfumes – this sense of the sacred implies essentially the sense of beauty and the tendency toward virtue; beauty is outward virtue as it were, and virtue, inward beauty. It also implies the sense of the metaphysical transparency of phenomena, that is, the capacity of grasping the principial within the manifested, the uncreated within the created; or of perceiving the vertical ray, messenger of the Archetype, independently of the plane of horizontal refraction, which determines the existential degree, but not the divine content. [GTUFS: TransfMan, The Sense of the Sacred]

Sacred Language: A language is sacred when God has spoken in it, and in order that God should speak in it, it must have certain characteristics such as are not found in any modern language. [GTUFS: UIslam, The Quran]

Sacred Scripture: A sacred Scripture . . . is a totality, a diversified image of Being, diversified and transfigured for the sake of the human receptacle; it is a light that wills to make itself visible to clay, or wills to take the form of that clay; or still in other words, it is a truth which, since it must address itself to beings compounded of clay, has no means of expression other than the very substance of the nescience of which our soul is made. [GTUFS: UIslam, The Quran]

Sacred Thought / Profane Thought (difference between): There is an essential distinction to be made here: there are errors that lie within the framework of integral and decisive truth, and there are errors that break this framework, and therein lies the whole difference between sacred and profane thought. It is sometimes said that no doctrine is entirely wrong and that there is truth in everything, but this is altogether false, because, while fundamental – and thus decisive – truths can neutralize any minor errors in a doctrine, minor truths are valueless within the framework of a major error; this is why one must never glorify an error for having taught us some truth or other, nor look for truth in errors on the pretext that truth is everywhere the same – for there are important nuances here – and above all one must not reject a fundamental and comprehensive truth because of a minor error that may happen to accompany it. Be that as it may, the human soul is capable, paradoxically and up to a certain point, of combining spiritual knowledge with a singular incapacity to express it in accordance with the total context and the logic of things. There is, after all, no common measure between the inner man attracted by the emanations of the Infinite, and the outer man living on preconceptions and habits and sometimes allowing his thought to move on a level proportionally far below his intelligence. It is of course desirable for man to match his thought to his real knowledge without letting any purely formal inconsistencies persist, but this is a particular grace. [GTUFS: ChristIslam, Dilemmas of Moslem Scholasticism]