Sohaib Durrani > Sohaib's Quotes

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was on of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”
― Harriet Tubman

“Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.”
― Dorothy West, The Wedding

“There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”
― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

“What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
― Audre Lorde

“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.”
― Yukio Mishima

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
― Aristotle

“Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini

“It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.”
― Sara Teasdale, The Collected Poems

“A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time”
― Patrick Geddes

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
― Charles Addams

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
― Victor Frankl

“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”
― Thomas Sowell

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov