Razi Shaikh > Razi's Quotes

“Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. ”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“And yet, in the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West are convinced that it is their civilization that will bring light and happiness to the world ... In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they thought of spreading the gospel of Christianity all over the world; but now that their religious ardour has cooled so much that they consider religion no more than soothing background music - allowed to accompany, but not to influence, 'real' life - they have begun to spread instead the materialistic gospel of the 'Western way of life': the belief that all human problems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desks of statisticians.”
― محمد أسد, The Road To Mecca

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.”
― Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind

“Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet

“I was too young to know how to love her.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Religion is a different matter. Other subjects may lend themselves, in varying degree, to objective study, and in some cases personal commitment serves only to distort what should be a clear and balanced picture. Religion is a different matter for here objectivity only skims the surface, missing the essential. The keys to understanding lie within the observer's own being and experience, and without these keys no door will open. This is particularly true of Islam, a religion which treats the distinction between belief and disbelief as the most fundamental of all possible distinction, comparable only on the physical level to that between the sighted and the blind. Believing and understanding complement and support one other. We do not seek fir an adequate description of a landscape from a blind man, even if he has made a scientific study of its topography, and has analyzed the nature of its rocks and vegetation. In Islam, every aspect of human life, every thought and every action, is shaped by and evaluated in the light of the basic article of faith. Remove this linchpin and the whole structure falls apart.”
― Gai Eaton

“I am too young and I've loved you too much.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“It was only now that he realized the meaning of words such as 'adore', 'prostate', 'worship', 'treat as idol or Gods' that poets used when they spoke of a beloved. It was only that he understood how it was possible for someone to love a human being in the way people love flocks of birds as they go back to their nests on an evening bathed in the orange light scattered on a river's bank; the way people can love the Raga Bhairavi being played on the santur in the last watch of the night; the way people can love the sound of a cataract in the background of snow-clad peaks when the dark night's collars is sundered by the first rays of morning; the way people love their doorstep when they return home from a long journey; the way people love beautiful carpets, heart-ravishing paintings: they just want to go on looking, watching, hearing, with no desire to possess, no expectation of a result, no experience of time passing, no illusion of something achieved.”
― Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

“I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“In our household doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul's rich, Westernised, secularist families is evident in these silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, football and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence - love,compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred - in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, return wordlessly to their inner worlds.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“For great men, religion is a way of making friends; small people make religion a fighting tool.”
― APJ Abdul Kalam, Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India

“Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past; all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure, the daring of their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture, their love of truth and beauty and freedom, the basic values that they set up, their understanding of life's mysterious ways, their toleration of other ways than theirs, their capacity to absorb other peoples and their cultural accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture; nor can we forget the myriad experiences which have built up our ancient race and lie embedded in our sub-conscious minds. We will never forget them or cease to take pride in that noble heritage of ours. If India forgets them she will no longer remain India and much that has made her our joy and pride will cease to be.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India

“A lunatic is just a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“She does not love you.
Your metaphors thrill her
you are her poet.
But that's all there's to it.

from “She Does Not Love You”
― Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals

“Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy”
― Khalil Gibran

“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

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”
― Ruskin Bond, Scenes from a Writer's Life

“People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.

Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.”
― Ruskin Bond, Best Of Ruskin Bond

“It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence”
― Noam Chomsky

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have
found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of
existence, it is India”
― French scholar Romain Rolland

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”
― Aristotle

“I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara

“Perhaps one day tired of circling the world I'll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes if not indefinitely then at least for a pause while I shift from one understanding of the world to another.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey