"If you wish to know which sciences and acts are the most important and beneficial for you, imagine that you are to die the next day and return to God to stand before Him and be asked to account for your knowledge, behaviour, and all your affairs and states, subsequently to be taken either to the Garden or the Fire. What you see there as most important and useful to you is precisely what you must now give priority and attachment to; whereas what you find useless, unimportant, frivolous, or simply of no great necessity is what you must neither pursue nor occupy yourself with in this life.
Meditate on this matter and reflect well; it is of tremendous benefit to those who have discernment and are concerned about their appointed time, their return to ALLAH , their salvation, and their success in the Hereafter, which is better and more enduring (Quran 87:17). Success is in the Hand of God, to whom belong all graces, for He bestows them on whomever He wills; and ALLAH's graces are immense!"
- Imam al-Haddad
[from 'Knowledge and Wisdom'
translated by Mostafa Badawi, Starlatch Press, 2001]