Rabia Muhammad > Rabia's Quotes

“Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, "Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?" ...Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, "We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.”
― Jarod Kintz, Great Listener Seeks Mute Women

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“If you understand others you are smart.
If you understand yourself you are illuminated.
If you overcome others you are powerful.
If you overcome yourself you have strength.
If you know how to be satisfied you are rich.
If you can act with vigor, you have a will.
If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting.
If you die without loss, you are eternal.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
― Erich fromm, The Art of Being

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“All knowledge is worth having.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“And just when you’d think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.”
― neil gaiman, terry pratchett

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.”
― Christopher Paolini, Brisingr

“It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!”
― Albert Einstein

“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
― Epictetus

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
― Albert Dietrich, Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

“But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.”
― Lauren DeStefano, Fever

“Creative people neither like to be possessive nor like to be possessed.”
― Amit Kalantri

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain