Rania > Rania's Quotes

“I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass

“Once you label me you negate me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I love portraits. I've always been fascinated by the fact that when you put a frame on something you create limits for it. It makes it look dead. The same works with labels, which is a popular hobby most people have nowadays, labeling.”
― Nuno Roque

“This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.”
― Nathan Filer

“What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinkng that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.
‘Society won’t stand for it.’
‘It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?’
‘If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it’
‘It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.’
‘It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?’
Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.”
― Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

“ فأومأتُ للسراب وأعلم أن ماء السراب كاذبٌ، وحملت البئرَ التي جفَّ ماؤها في داخلي وكنت كلما أحببتُ أحداً أقع فيها. ويوسف لم يكن اسمي ”
― بسام حجار, مجرد تعب

“و المرء لا تشقيه إلاّ نفسه حاشى الحياة بأنّها تشقيه
ما أجهل الإنسان يضني بعضه بعضا و يشكو كلّ ما يضنيه
و يظنّ أن عدوّه في غيره و عدوّه يمسي و يضحي فيه”
― عبدالله البردوني

“ إنني لأخشى إن انجابت عنا هذه الظلمة و غمرنا الضوء أن يكره كل واحد منا النظر في وجه صاحبه" آمنة”
― طه حسين, دعاء الكروان

“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called "life."
Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft — and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them!
Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense
of direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you
on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort
zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of
being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you
no longer are.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery