Waqar > Waqar's Quotes

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.
This is but half the truth.
You are also as strong as your strongest link.
To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean
by the frailty of its foam.
To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“[T]hink of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Women who channel their energies toward reaching the top of corporate America undermine the struggles of women trying to realize institutional change by organizing unions and implementing laws that protect women (and men) in the workplace.”
― Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital

“The goal of feminism is justice and equality for all women, not simply equal opportunity for women or equal participation by women. By aligning the goals of feminism with the goals of capitalism, Sandberg’s model of emancipation functions as ideology, accepting and undergirding the dominant structures of power in society.”
― Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

“Happiness comes from helping others, by being with others, and by sharing, even if it's only a smile.”
― Zain Hashmi, A Blessed Olive Tree: A Spiritual Journey in Twenty Short Stories

“Small good decisions will lead you to the glorious path of success.”
― Zain Hashmi, A Blessed Olive Tree: A Spiritual Journey in Twenty Short Stories

“Some of the fighters wear the best uniforms, do the best drills, but hardly anyone has seen them fighting. Some you won't even think that they are fighters, but they are the best knights on the battlefield.”
― Zain Hashmi, A Blessed Olive Tree: A Spiritual Journey in Twenty Short Stories

“The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“رات یوں دل میں تری کھوئی ہوئی یاد آئی
جیسے ویرانے میں چپکے ے بہار آجائے
جیسے صحراؤں میں ہولے سے چلے بادِ نسیم
جیسے بیمار کو بے وجہ قرار آجائے”
― Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Nuskha ha-e Wafa / نسخہ ہائے وفا

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
― Fred Moten

“wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“watching and witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as honestly as we can.”
― Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War