Iman > Iman's Quotes

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“إذا المرء لا يرعاك إلا تكلفاً.. فدعه ولا تُكثِر عليه التأسفا
ففي الناس أبدال وفي الترك راحةٌ.. وفي القلب صبرٌ للحبيب ولو جفا
فما كل من تهواه يهواكَ قلبُه.. ولا كل من صافيته لك قد صفا
إذا لم يكن صفو الوداد طبيعةً.. فلا خيرَ في ودٍ يجئُ تكلٌفا
ولا خيرَ في خِلٍ يخون خليله.. ويلقاهُ من بعدِ المودة بالجفا
ويُنكِرُ عيشاً قد تقادم عهدهُ.. ويُظهِرُ سراً كان بالأمس قد خفا
سلامٌ على الدنيا إذا لم يكن بها.. صديقٌ صدوقٌ صادقُ الوعدِ مُنصِفا”
― محمد بن إدريس الشافعي

“!لك شيء في هذا العالم.. فقم”
― غسان كنفاني

“Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. ”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”
― Bernard Malamud

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

“Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”
― Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts

“A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”
― Socrates

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis