Despina > Despina's Quotes

“قل للذي احصى السنين مفاخراً
يا صاح ليس السر في السنوات
لكنه في المرء كيف يعيشها
في يقظة ام في عميق سبات”
― ايليا ابو ماضي

“وطريقي ما طريقي؟ أطويلٌ أم قصير؟
هل أنا أصعد أم أهبط فيه وأغور؟
أأنا السائر في الدرب؟ أم الدرب يسير؟
أم كلانا واقف والدهر يجري؟
لست أدري؟”
― إيليا أبو ماضي

“THE darkness of which the soul here speaks relates, as I have said,1 to the desires and powers of sense, interior and spiritual, all of which are deprived of their natural light in this night, that, being purified as to this, they may be supernaturally enlightened. The desires of sense and spirit are lulled to sleep and mortified, unable to relish anything either human or divine; the affections of the soul are thwarted and brought low, become helpless, and have nothing to rest upon; the imagination is fettered, and unable to make any profitable reflections, the memory is gone, and the will, too, is dry and afflicted, and all the faculties are empty and useless,2 and, moreover, a dense and heavy cloud overshadows the soul, distresses it and holds it as if it were far away from God. This is the darkness in which the soul says that it travels in safety. 2. The reason of this”
― St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul

“وكن رجلا ناهضا ينتمي
إلى نفسه عندما يسأل
فلست الثياب التي ترتدي
ولست الأسامي التي تحمل
ولست البلاد التي أنبتتك
ولكنّما أنت ما تفعل
إذا كنت من وطن خامل
وفزت فأنت الفتى الأفضل”
― إيليا أبو ماضي, ديوان إيليا أبو ماضي

“أحببتك اكثر مما علموني في الصلاة
أنا ألف مرة يخطر ببالي
:أن أناديك بصوت بسيط
أين أنت يا ربي ؟”
― زياد الرحباني, صديقي الله

“أتحدّاك بالخطيئة
تتحدّاني بالحب
وأَسكت
لأننا
أنت الحب
وأنا لست الخطيئة”
― زياد الرحباني, صديقي الله

“يا كلّ كـلّي و كلّ الكـلّ ملتبس و كل كـلّك ملبوس بمعنائــي
يا من به عُلقَتْ روحي فقد تلفت وجدا فصرتَ رهينا تحت أهوائي”
― الحلاج, ديوان الحلاج

“فالوَجْدُ باقٍ، والوِصالُ مُماطِلي، والصّبرُ فانٍ، واللّقاءُ مُسَوّفي
أنتَ القتيلُ بأيِّ منْ أحببتهُ فاخترْ لنفسكَ في الهوى منْ تصطفي”
― ابن الفارض

“لأنتِ مني قلبي وغاية بغيتي
وأقصى مرادي واختياري وخيرتي”
― ابن الفارض, ديوان ابن الفارض

“إذا غامرت في شرف مروم ...فلا تقنع بما دون النجوم”
― أبو الطيب المتنبي

“How to Win Against an Abuser? I get this question all the time, and my answer is always the same: Don’t try to win. As soon as we engage in this win/lose mentality, we abandon our hearts and forget what’s really important: vulnerability and love. Yes, absolutely you should remove toxic people from your life, but it should be from the perspective of self-love, not “winning.” As long as we maintain this false illusion of control, we’re still connected to the person in our psyches. A hallmark of C-PTSD is fantasizing about gaining some power over an otherwise powerless situation.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse

“Core Wound: Like most protective selves, the avoidant wound seems to be largely based around a wound of rejection—specifically, any kind of humiliation or ridicule. These are shame-based experiences that can leave long-lasting imprints. While you may long for meaningful human contact deep down, the protective self is too afraid to experience genuine emotions. It worries that expressing emotions (especially negative ones) will cause you to seem crazy and be judged by others, pushing them away.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse

“غالبيتنا يرتدي زي الوعاظ والناصحين في الأماكن المغلقة ثم لا نذهب إلى أبعد من ذلك قولا أو فعلا.. كل منا يعيش في فقاعة منطقية خاصة به يعتمد فيها علي مفاهيمه ومداركه المحدودة المستمدة من واقعه فقط”
― أشرف العشماوي, المرشد

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung

“The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Dryness and the Dark Night”:2 A certain scientist devoted his life to developing a strain of butterfly that would be the most beautiful combination of colors ever seen on this planet. After years of experimentation, he was certain that he had a cocoon that would produce his genetic masterpiece. On the day that the butterfly was expected to emerge, he gathered together his entire staff. All waited breathlessly as the creature began to work its way out of the cocoon. It disengaged its right wing, its body, and most of its left wing. Just as the staff were ready to cheer and pass the champagne and cigars, they saw with horror that the extremity of the left wing of the butterfly was stuck in the mouth of the cocoon. The creature was desperately flapping its other wing to free itself. As it labored, it grew more and more exhausted. Each new effort seemed more difficult, and the intervals between efforts grew longer. At last the scientist, unable to bear the tension, took a scalpel and cut a tiny section from the mouth of the cocoon. With one final burst of strength, the butterfly fell free onto the laboratory table. Everybody cheered and reached for the cigars and the champagne. Then silence again descended on the room. Although the butterfly was free, it could not fly. . . The struggle to escape from the cocoon is nature’s way of forcing blood to the extremities of a butterfly’s wings so that when it emerges from the cocoon it can enjoy its new life and fly to its heart’s content. In seeking to save the creature’s life, the scientist had truncated its capacity to function. A butterfly that cannot fly is a contradiction in terms. This is a mistake that God is not going to make. The image of God watching Anthony has to be understood. God holds back his infinite mercy from rushing to the rescue when we are in temptation and difficulties. He will not actively intervene because the struggle is opening and preparing every recess of our being for the divine energy of grace. God is transforming us so that we can enjoy the divine life to the full once it has been established. If the divine help comes too soon, before the work of purification and healing has been accomplished, it may frustrate our ultimate ability to live the divine life.”
― Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.”
― Robert Frost, West-Running Brook

“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is Christ. Each has awaited new partners who will pick them up in a kind of second and adulterous union. Communism comes along and picks up the meaningless Cross; Western post-Christian civilization chooses the unscarred Christ.

Communism has chosen the Cross in the sense that it has brought back to an egotistic world a sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supra-individual goals. But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentration camps, firing squads, and brain-washings.

The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colourless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“Why did Our Blessed Lord use bread and wine as the elements of this Memorial? First of all, because no two substances in nature better symbolize unity than bread and wine. As bread is made from a multiplicity of grains of wheat, and wine is made from a multiplicity of grapes, so the many who believe are one in Christ. Second, no two substances in nature have to suffer more to become what they are than bread and wine. Wheat has to pass through the rigors of winter, be ground beneath the Calvary of a mill, and then subjected to purging fire before it can become bread. Grapes in their turn must be subjected to the Gethsemane of a wine press and have their life crushed from them to become wine. Thus, do they symbolize the Passion and Sufferings of Christ, and the condition of Salvation, for Our Lord said unless we die to ourselves we cannot live in Him. A third reason is that there are no two substances in nature which have more traditionally nourished man than bread and wine. In bringing these elements to the altar, men are equivalently bringing themselves. When bread and wine are taken or consumed, they are changed into man's body and blood. But when He took bread and wine, He changed them into Himself.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“الثقافة هى المعرفة الممزوجة بالكرامة، فلو كانت الثقافة تعنى المعرفة فقط لما اهتاجت السلطة، فماذا يهمها من سابلة الثقافة ورعاعها، إنما الذى يصنع الأزمة الدائمة هى الثقافة ذات الكرامة.. لها إشعاعها الخاص، تلمحه فى بريق العيون ووضاءة الجبهة وجلال العقل ونصاعة الموقف، إشعاع يكشف الزيف ويصارع التلفيق ويضرب المخاتلة”
― يوسف إدريس, أهمية أن نتثقف يا ناس

“الثقافة عندنا بالتالى لا يوجد لها اى أثر سياسى أو إجتماعى , فما سمعنا عن ثورة قامت إثر كتابة رواية او قصيدة مثلما فعلت قصة " كوخ العم توم " التى أشعلت ثورة الزنوج فى امريكا وينضم محمود درويش أو ادونيس أو البياتى أو نزار قبانى من أعمق اعماقه ويكتب ما شاء من هوامش على دفاتر النكسة أو استثارة للحمية والحماسة ولا حياة لمن ينادون , فنحن نأخذ الشعر على أنه فن القول الجميل , والكتابة على انها حرفة صناعة القصة أو المسرحية الجيدة , نهتز طرباً للبيت إذا احببنا البيت وإذا انتهى الشاعر من قراءة قصيدته ذهب كل إلى حاله و كأنه لم يسمع شيئاً .”
― يوسف إدريس, إسلام بلا ضفاف

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving