Usman Chohan > Usman's Quotes

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka

“Actions that exemplify the limitations of a singular devotion to the profit motive, also draw a troublesome distinction between what is legal and what is moral.”
― Usman W. Chohan

“It might seem that being a genius is a golden ticket to a life of glamorous soirees with the intellectual elite, champagne flute in hand, arm candy at your side, surrounded by a throng of smiling sycophants. But you might be confusing this scene with the lifestyle of a diplomat”
― André de Guillaume, How to Be a Genius: A Handbook for the Aspiring Smarty-Pants

“To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy.”
― Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan

“Oscar Wilde may have quipped that one can “never be overdressed or overeducated,” but Wilde did not live in our era of overeducated baristas.”
― Usman W. Chohan

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Policymakers cannot take the situation lightly, for at its worst, it speaks to “intergenerational inequity” – a breaking of the social contract between two generations.”
― Usman W. Chohan

“If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another”
― Epicurus

“The cultivation of the intellect is man's highest good and purest happiness”
― Aristotle

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.”
― Zig Ziglar

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
― Epictetus

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Andre Gide

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames”
― Rumi

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.”
― Alexander the Great

“Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , La vieillesse

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.”
― Aleksander Pushkin

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”
― Carl Sagan

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”
― Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Almagest

“Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.”
― Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”
― George Washington

“...status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“You have reminded me of how alien I found the concept of acquaintances splitting the bill when I first arrived in your country. I had been raised to favour mutual generosity over mathematical precision in such matters; given time both work equally well to even a score.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“The antagonists of finance’s future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all.”
― Usman W. Chohan

“Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism