Aslam Mir > Aslam's Quotes

“Strange how for the last five hundred years the fate of The Jews had so often been tied to our own (Muslims') future. Where we suffer, they suffer. Where we prosper, they prosper. Where they are present and we are not, they fail to defend themselves and are slaughtered like sheep.It is the same story here, in al-Abdalus and in al-Quds,Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus. (A Sultan In Palermo, Islam Quintet 4, Tariq Ali, page 221, 222)”
― Tariq Ali, A Sultan in Palermo

“And when your soul, the flame, the spark, meets with the divine fuel that is so pure and so strong, it results in immense enlightenment: the enlightenment of God. Light upon light, Noorun Alaa Noor.”
― Zain Hashmi, A Blessed Olive Tree: A Spiritual Journey in Twenty Short Stories

“We all need colors to fill the blank spaces within the faint and drab outlines of our all-too-short lives.”
― Osama Siddique, Snuffing out the Moon

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

“There are all the hidden menaces of long journeys on the way.
But we shall go.
Treat it as exile or a new beginning.”
― Osama Siddique, Snuffing out the Moon

“There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“وہ شوخ چشم، مشک بدن کون لے گیا
میرےتتار تیرے ہرن کون لے گیا
گلیاں خموش، راہ گزاریں اداس ہیں کوچہ نوردیوں کی لگن کون لے گیا
اب چاند کوئی بام سے ہوتا نہیں طلوع
غرفوں سے جھانکنے کا چلن کون لے گیا
جو روز جھانکتی تھی کواڑوں کی اوٹ سے
اے بند کھڑکیو! وہ کرن کون لے گیا وہ رت جگوں کے چاہنے والے کہاں گئے ہنگامہ ہائے شعر وسخن کون لے گیا ( عرفان صدیقی، ، سخن اباد، کلیات صفحات 140 تا 142)”
― Irfan Siddiqui, Canvas

“Hardest created thing is the Stone. Iron is even harder than Stone since it cuts the Stone. Fire is even harder than Iron since it can melt the Iron. Water is even harder than Fire since it can extinguish it. Clouds are even harder than Water since they move it around. Winds are even harder than Clouds since they move the Clouds around. Yet Angel who dispatches the Wind is harder than the Wind itself. And the Angel of Death is even harder than the Angel which dispatches the Winds since it can take away its life. And Death is even harder than the Angel of Death, since it takes away the Angel of Death. Yet harder than all these is the order of God - the Lord of the Two Worlds - which can take away death itself.”
― -

“I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back. (#92 ff.)”
― Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again: More Than 700 Jokes, Limericks and Anecdotes

“Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks,
for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume.
—Arabic saying ~800 AD”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“به تو گفتم: «گنجشک ِ کوچک ِ من باش
تا در بهار ِ تو من درختي پُرشکوفه شوم.»
و برف آب شد شکوفه رقصيد آفتاب درآمد
من به خوبي‌ها نگاه کردم و عوض شدم
من به خوبي‌ها نگاه کردم
چرا که تو خوبي و اين همه اقرارهاست، بزرگ‌ترين ِ اقرارهاست
من به اقرارهاي‌ام نگاه کردم
سال ِ بد رفت و من زنده شدم
تو لب‌خند زدي و من برخاستم

دل‌ام مي‌خواهد خوب باشم
دل‌ام مي‌خواهد تو باشم و براي ِ همين راست مي‌گويم


نگاه کن:
با من بمان!”
― احمد شاملو, هوای تازه

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”
― John Keats

“مردن مفت و مجانی نیست!باید با
کفن ِخوشگل ِمصور به قصه های گلدوزی خدمت حضرت عزرائیل برسی.نفس آخر کلی کار میبرد.سئانس آخر سینماست...باید به هر قیمتی از خودت مایه بگذاری!”
― لویی فردینان سلین

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
― Jean Racine

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A simple metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Sleepwalkers

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Something else raised him above the others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book in that restaurant before. In Tereza's eyes, books were the weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."( The Unforgettable lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, page 47)”
― Milan Kundera

“The Qur’an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to
salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was
to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole.”
― Jeffrey Lang, Struggling to Surrender: Some Impressions of an American Convert to Islam

“THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The characters in my novels are my unrealized possibilities, That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ' I' ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." ( Milan Kundera, The Unforgettable Lightness of Being: Page, 218)”
― Milan Kundera

“Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: 'I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries. The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin salarius, meaning of salt. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.)" ( Peter Watson, Ideas: A history of thought and invention, from fire to Freud, page 71).”
― Peter Watson

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

“سب دن اور سب زمانے ہمارے اندر ہیں مگر ہم اپنی تنگ ظرفی سے انھیں مار کر ماضی بنا دیتے ہیں اور اپنے اندر دفن کر دیتے ہیں۔ ہمارا اندر ؟ ایک بڑا مدفن ہے جس میں جانے کتنے آج' کل بن کر دبے پڑے ہیں۔ مجھ پر سنک سوار ہے کہ کہانی کا منتر پھونک کر سوئے ہوئے کلوں کو جگاؤ اور اپنے اس ننھے سے جاگتے آج میں سمولو! مگر پھر وہی بات کہ میں نہ ہاتھی ہوں کہ مجھے اپنے سارے کل یاد ہوں نہ مہاتما بدھ ہوں کہ سارے گزرے کلوں کو سمیٹ کر ایک جگمگا تا آج بنالوں، مگر چلو حسرت ہی سہی۔ اس حسرت کا حق تو مجھ سے مت چھینو۔" ( انتظار حسین، کچھوے، صفحہ: 176)”
― Intizar Husain, Kachway / کچھوے