Ahlem > Ahlem's Quotes

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“القوة الحاكمة السياسية هى التى تحدد للشعب ما هو المقدس وما هو المُدنس , ما هوالقانونى وغير القانونى , ما هو الشرعى وغير الشرعى .
أما الحقيقة فهى تُدفَن فى التاريخ , حتى يملك الشعب كتابة التاريخ بنفسه , حتى تملك الأم المنكوبة القلم , وتكتب بنفسها تاريخ حياتها .”
― نوال السعداوي, ملك وامرأة وإله

“A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad environments, and bad ideas (and the innocent, of course, have supremely bad luck). Which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being is responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character. Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.

Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“We are not self-caused little gods.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Why didn’t I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”
― Bertrand Russell

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled.
"Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?"
"What?"
"Oh, you'd like something simpler?”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart

“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
― George Carlin