Safae > Safae's Quotes

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“نجتاز الحاضر بعيون معصوبة، وأقصى ما نستطيعه هو أن نستشعر ونخمّن ما نعيشه. ونحن لا ندرك ما عشناه ونفهم معناه إلا لاحقاً، عندما تزول العصابة عن أعيننا، ونعيد تفحّص الماضي .”
― ميلان كونديرا, Laughable Loves

“God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’

Which of us was right, boss?”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Optimism is the opium of the people.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A man is responsible for his ignorance.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“ليس الأمر إنهما يتبادلان الكراهية ، أو أن اللامبالاة حلّت محل الحب .. لا تستطيعين قياس المحبة المتبادلة بين كائنين بشريين بكمية الكلمات التي يتبادلانها !”
― ميلان كونديرا, Identity

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death