Mariya > Mariya's Quotes

“I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful!”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“And one of these rules said, The Path to the Truth is a labor of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide! Not your mind. Meet, challenge and ultimately prevail over your nafs with your heart. Knowing your ego will lead you to the knowledge of God.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“The idea that we could control the course of your lives through rational choices was as absurd as a fish trying to control the ocean in which it swam. The idea of knowing self has generated not only false expectations but also disappointments in places where life does not match our expectations.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Now, you think I am a religious man. But I am not. I am spiritual, which is different. Religiosity and spirituality are not the same thing and I believe that the gap between the two has never been greater than it is today.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“On the one hand, we believe in the freedom and power of the individual regardless of God, government, or society. In many ways human beings are becoming more self-centered and the world is becoming more materialistic. On the other hand, humanity as a whole is becoming more spiritual.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“He believed that love had nothing to do with 'plans for tomorrow' or 'memories of yesterday'. Love could only be here and now. One of his earlier e-mails to her had ended with this note: 'I'm a Sufi, the child of the present moment'.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Choice, ranging from the trivial to the life-altering in both its presence and its absence, is an inextricable part of our life stories.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else.
Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.”
― Sheena Iyengar

“Your choices of which clothes to wear or which soda to drink, where you live, which school to attend and what to study, and of course your profession all say something about you, and it’s your job to make sure that they are an accurate reflection of who you really are.
But who are you, really? The imperative “Just be yourself!” seems straightforward enough. (What could be easier than being who you already are?) Yet we often end up blinking in its headlights, perhaps frozen in place by the concomitant notion that we might, if we are not careful, turn into someone else. It’s difficult to move forward when each step could move us further away from the “authentic” self, and so we dither.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“Your enjoyment of the chosen options will be diminished by your regret over what you had to give up. In fact, the sum total of the regret over all the “lost” options may end up being greater than your joy over your chosen options, leaving you less satisfied than you would have been if you had had less choice to begin with.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“life has a way of poking holes in your plans, or in the plans others make for you”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“ no matter how prepared we are, though , we can still have the wind knocked out of us.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“valuing the condition of having options over the quality of the options can sometimes lead to decisions that don’t serve us well.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“The challenges we face when it comes to identity and choice exist precisely because choosing is not only a private activity but a social one, a negotiation between many moving parts. Choice requires us to think more deeply about who we are, both within ourselves and in the eyes of others.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“True choice requires that a person have the ability to choose an option and not be prevented from choosing it by any external force, meaning that a system tending too far toward either extreme will limit People’s opportunities. Also, both extremes can produce additional problems in practice. Aside from the fact that a lack of “freedom to” can lead to privation, suffering, and death for those who can’t provide for themselves, it can also lead to a de facto plutocracy.
The extremely wealthy can come to wield disproportionate power, enabling them to avoid punishment for illegal practices or to change the law itself in ways that perpetuate their advantages at the cost of others, a charge often levied against the “robber baron” industrialists of the late nineteenth century.
A lack of “freedom from,” on the other hand, can encourage people to do less work than they’re capable of since they know their needs will be met, and it may stifle innovation and entrepreneurship because people receive few or no additional material benefits for exerting additional effort.
Moreover, a government must have extensive power over its people to implement such a system, and as can be seen in the actions of the majority of communist governments in the past, power corrupts.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“we all make assumptions about the world—based on individual experience and cultural background—that affect our judgment of how that balance should look”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“Ask Americans “How similar are you to others?” and on average they will answer “Not very.” Ask the same question in reverse—“How similar are others to you?”—and their judgment of similarity increases noticeably.
The two answers should be exactly the same because the questions are, in essence, identical, but we manage to delude ourselves, just as we all claim to be above average or wholly unsusceptible to social influence. Time and time again, each one of us assumes that he or she stands out. What is it that makes us believe we’re more unique than everyone else?”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“We may appreciate and aspire to a certain level of uniqueness, but we believe it’s also important that our choices be understood”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, “You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.” The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge “limits the choices you can make and will make”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser’s dream.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing