M B > M's Quotes

“أيها القراء المخدوعون إن هدف الصحيفة الأول إيه صحيفة ليست الوطنية ولا للثقافة ولا خدمه الشعب ولا حرية الرأي ولا رفع منار الفضيلة ولا شيء من كل هذه الخزعبلات
أن هدف الصحيفة الأول هو بيع الصحيفة هو المكسب هو أكل العيش فهدفنا الربح.
فإذا كانت الوطنية مربحه فلتحيا الوطنية وإذا كان الهزل والفكاهة أكثر ربحا فلتسقط الوطنية وليحيا الهزل والفكاهة وإذا كان ذكر الفضائح أشد ربحا فلتحيا الفضائح وإذا كانت محاربة الرذيلة وسيلة لانتشار الجريدة فلتحيا الفضيلة وإذا كانت الصورة الفاضحة والسيقان العارية والنهود البارزة وسيلة ربح فلتذهب الفضيلة إلى حيث ألقت.”
― يوسف السباعي, أرض النفاق

“Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“I've lived to see my longings die"

I've lived to se my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.

Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.

Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes!”
― Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

“These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.”
― Coleman Barks

“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.”
― Bertrand Russell

“His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives--especially those he disliked--about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.”
― John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun

“Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children–to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

“I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world."

[Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]”
― George Whitman

“I once knew of a girl whose story forms the substance of the diary. Whether he has seduced others I do not know... we learn of his desire for something altogether arbitrary. With the help of his mental gifts he knew how to tempt a girl to draw her to him without caring to possess her in any stricter sense.

I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all then he would leave without a word let a lone a declaration a promise.

The unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to. She could only be constantly tossed about in a terrible witches' dance at one moment reproaching herself forgiving him at another reproaching him and then since the relationship would only have been actual in a figurative sense she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been an imagination.

”
― Soren Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary

“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
― John Keats

“He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South