Afrah Nasser > Afrah's Quotes

“Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom.”
― Bodhidharma

“For money you can have everything it is said. No, that is not true. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge but not intelligence; glitter, but not comfort; fun, but not pleasure; acquaintances, but not friendship; servants, but not faithfulness; grey hair, but not honor; quiet days, but not peace. The shell of all things you can get for money. But not the kernel. That cannot be had for money.”
― Arne Garborg

“The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.”
― Juliette Lewis

“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and laugh until it hurts. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“إن المرأة تحب رجلها ليس لأنه أقوى الرجال، و لا أوسمهم، و لا أغناهم، بل لأنه هو.. بضعفه و قوته.. و الحب ليس إستعراض قوة لكنه طاقة عطاء دافئة مستمرة”
― أحمد خالد توفيق

“لا أخاف الموت ..أخاف أن أموت قبل أن أحيا”
― أحمد خالد توفيق

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“Why not make cheerfulness, outrageousness, playfulness a new priority for yourself? Make feeling good your expectation. You don’t have to have a reason to feel good—you’re alive; you can feel good for no reason at all!”
― Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

“Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards.”
― Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

“Know that it’s your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.”
― Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“حين أمنحك وقتي ؛ فأنا حينها أمنحك جزءًا لن أستردّه من حياتي ؛ فأرجو ألّا تجعلني أندم.
❤”
― نجيب محفوظ

“We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes it’s not the butterflies that tell you you're in love, but the pain.” - Unknown”
― Kat T. Masen, The Trouble With Love

“Plain and simple, passion is a commitment without condition. It requires intensity for caring about something without regard to difficulty.”
― Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

“To allow ourselves to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. Thomas Merton, American Catholic theologian, poet, author, and social activist”
― Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

“Being passionate is about recognizing what makes you happy, focusing on and learning about it, and, ultimately, doing it in the name of your own satisfaction and pleasure.”
― Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“أرقى النفوس هي التي تجرعت الألم فتجنبت أن تذيق الآخرين مرارته

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The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome.”
― Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes

“I read; I travel; I become”
― Derek Walcott

“Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984

“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…”
― Derek Walcott