Mo Waleed > Mo's Quotes

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“وكلما توجهت رصاصة لصدره
بدقة تامة،
تمر
،لحسن الحظ
من ثقب قديم في القلب”
― عماد أبو صالح, عجوز تؤلمه الضحكات

“عماد أبو صالح
أنظر للذين يتكلمون عن متعة الكتابة وأضحك. جارسيا ماركيز يقول: أكتب ليحبني أصدقائي أكثر". لورانس داريل يقول: "لكي أحقق ذاتي". آلان جوفروا يقول: "لندافع عن أنفسنا على هذه الأرض البيضاء". ويقول الحكيم الفرعوني: "ليبقى اسمك في فم الناس".

لا.
أنا ...لا أكتب لأشياء من هذه. الكتابة عندي الم. كأني أستفرغ أمعائي. نزيف متواصل. قلمي في الحبر، إصبعي في دمي. لم أختر الكتابة ابدًا برغبتي. شأن كل شيء في عمري. عمري الذي ضاع نصفه دون أن أختار أي شيء برغبة مني.
من الذي يمسك كرباجًا، كلما اقف، يلسعني به على ظهري؟ من الذي يدفعني، غصبًا عني، لأكتب؟
الله؟
الشيطان؟

ما أحببته، وأنا طفل، هو أن أكون نجارًا. كنت مبهورًا بالنجارين. برائحة الخشب. بالعاشق والمعشوق يحضنان بعضهما إلى الأبد. كنت أطاردهم من بيت إلى بيت، حتى يسمحوا لي أن أكشط سطح خشبة خشنة، وأترك ملمسها ناعمًا رائع البياض. كثيرة هي الايدي التي أعادتني بالصفعات، لأذاكر دروسي. إلى حفلات التعذيب بالقراءة و.. الكتابة. يد أبي. يد أمي. يد المدرس. يد النجار هو نفسه.

لا أعرف لماذا أخاف الكتابة؟ ألأنها تتغذى على أعز ما فيّ؟ ألأنها تمص عصيري؟
هل لارتباطها بالمدرسين غلاظ الأكباد، ولجان الامتحانات، والمراقبين بعيونهم البوليسية، ورعب السقوط آخر العام؟
هل لارتباطها بالأفندي؟ بسلطة قميصه وبنطلونه على أعمامي أصحاب الجلابيب؟
أي مسخرة في أن أكون كاتبًا، وأمي في البلد هناك، تخطئ كل مساء في عد إوزاتها، وأبي يضع للفاء نقطتين وللقاف نقطة واحدة؟

سأسكت. حين أكتب أفضح نفسي.
ما أجمل الصمت.
ما أجمل البياض، قبل أن يتوسخ بحبر الكتابة.

أنا أكره الكتابة.

شيء سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف سخيف ”
― عماد أبو صالح

“حين نموت وتنهش الديدان لحم وجوهنا التي خرّبتها الحياة تبتسم جماجمنا ابتسامة كبيرة.”
― عماد أبو صالح, عجوز تؤلمه الضحكات

“ظل مسجوناً
إلى أن أضاء بياض شعره
ظلام زنزانته”
― عماد أبو صالح, عجوز تؤلمه الضحكات

“أحبك
ضد رغبة أمك
ضد العالم والزمن
ضدك أنتِ نفسك
أنا خجلان من أن أقول:
" ضد إرادة الله
الذي شاء أن تكوني
لواحد غيري”
― عماد أبو صالح

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”
― Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.

The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!”
― Brian Cox

“Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn’t exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began.”
― Brian Cox

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
― Karl Marx

“Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“Everyone knows the
story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun
(it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of
them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the
twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do
not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a
great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that,
after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a
campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not
have lived in vain.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
― Michel Foucault

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”
― Michel Foucault

“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary