Abderrahman > Abderrahman's Quotes

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.”
― Immanuel Kant

“In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“[Standing armies] constantly threaten other nations with war by giving the appearance that they are prepared for it, which goads nations into competing with one another in the number of men under arms, and this practice knows no bounds. And since the costs related to maintaining peace will in this way finally become greater than those of a short war, standing armies are the cause of wars of aggression that are intended to end burdensome expenditures. Moreover, paying men to kill or be killed appears to use them as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (the nation), which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity.”
― Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

“Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.”
― Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”
― Socrates

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“كل إنبعاث وكل خلاص..إنما يكون لدى المرأة بالحب..ولا يمكن أن يتجلى إلا حباً!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime And Punishment

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth."

[From: 19 Lessons On Tea]”
― Alexander Pushkin

“Thus people--so it seems to me--
Become good friends from sheer ennui.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.”
― Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading

“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud , Civilization and Its Discontents

“The ego is not master in its own house.”
― Sigmund Freud

“My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice