M. Kirollos > M.'s Quotes

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“You all laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same.”
― John Davis

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“ليس " التخلف" فقراً فقط. إنه كائن أخطبوطي، ولد في الظلام من الفقر والجهل. وعاش في الغفلة والبلادة. تربى في العجز وضيق الأفق. التخلف بالنسبة لي جسد حي، أصارعه في كل لحظة من لحظات وجودي: في بيتي، في عملي، في الشارع، في الوجوه، والمشاعر، في مداخل المدن، وتحت الكباري، في العلاقات بين الناس، في الحب.. فيما أقرأ وأتناول.. فيما أرضى عنه وفيما أرفضه.”
― علاء الديب, وقفة قبل المنحدر: من أوراق مثقف مصري

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.”
― Thomas Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof: With the History of the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“الخوف لا يمنع من الموت و لكنه يمنع من الحياة.”
― نجيب محفوظ, أولاد حارتنا

“كان على أن أعيش السجن، فى بيتى، وشارعى، وعملى. كان على أن أضاجع كل ليلة جسد الحلم الميت والآمال المحبطة.”
― علاء الديب, وقفة قبل المنحدر: من أوراق مثقف مصري

“مسئولية تغيير العالم تتحلل إلى تمرد عليه، والتمرد ينفك إلى شعور بالغربة والاغتراب، والغربة تقود إلى رصد الملل ومتابعة التكرار.”
― علاء الديب, وقفة قبل المنحدر: من أوراق مثقف مصري

“على تلك الصخور الملعونة: الحقائق. الإمكانيات والظروف، أرى كائناتى الأثيرة الوردية تتحطم فى صمت، دون دماء أو صراخ أو مآسى .. تتحطم فى صمت كأنها لم تكن.
أشاهد تحطمها: صاغرا، بليدا، متخلفا. غير قادر حتى على تحطيم سور بيتى أو تخطى حدود مدينتى.”
― علاء الديب, وقفة قبل المنحدر: من أوراق مثقف مصري

“البشر ينسى والأمم تنسى.
الإنسان المتحضر هو من يبقى تاريخه حياً .. الأمم المتحضرة هى التى لا تدفن تاريخها ولا تكرر مآسيها. يقول كاتب كوبى يصف حال شعبه كواحد من شعوب العالم الثالث: “نحن لا نعرف المدنية لأن التمدن هو القدرة على ربط الأشياء بعضها ببعض، دون إهمال شىء أو نسيان شىء، إننا ننسى الماضى بسهولة وننغمس كثيرا فى الحاضر”
― علاء الديب, وقفة قبل المنحدر: من أوراق مثقف مصري

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“If a man crosses a river
and an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be bad tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, and yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because someone is in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty,
He would not be shouting, and not angry.
If you can empty your own boat
Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you”
― Chuang-Tzu

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If our life did not fade and vanish like the dews of Adashino’s graves or the drifting smoke from Toribe’s burning grounds, but lingered on for ever, how little the world would move us. It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.”
― Yoshida Kenkō

“It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.

It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul

"Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!"

My soul does not reply.

"Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?"

My soul remains mute.

"Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty."

Not a word. -- Is my soul dead?

Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!"

Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: "It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation