Hassan Kassim > Hassan's Quotes

“*دع الأيام تفعل ما تشاء
وطب نفسا إذا حكم القضاء*

*ولا تجزع لحادثة الليالي
فما لحوادث الدنيا بقاء*

*وكن رجلا على الأهوال جلدا
وشيمتك السماحة والوفاء*

*وإن كثرت عيوبك في البرايا
وسرك أن يكون لها غطاء*

*تستر بالسخاء فكل عيب
يغطيه كماقيل السخاء*

*ولاترِللأعادي قط ذلا
فإن شماتة الأعدا بلاء*

*ولا ترج السماحة من بخيل
فما في النارللظمآن ماء*

*ورزقك ليس ينقصه التأني
وليس يزيد في الرزق العناء*

*ولاحزن يدوم ولا سرور
ولابؤس عليك ولا رخاء*

*إذا ما كنت ذا قلب قنوع
فأنت ومالك الدنيا سواء*

*ومن نزلت بساحته المنايا
فلا أرض تقيه ولاسماء*

*وأرض الله واسعة ولكن
إذا نزل القضا ضاق الفضاء*

*دع الأيام تغدر كل حين
فما يغني عن الموت الدواء*”
― محمد بن إدريس الشافعي

“In my experience, successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory. In the long run, painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins—those who are armed with a healthy attitude and are able to draw wisdom from every experience, “good” or “bad,” are the ones who make it down the road. They are also the ones who are happier along the way. Of course the real challenge is to stay in range of this long-term perspective when you are under fire and hurting in the middle of the war. This, maybe our biggest hurdle, is at the core of the art of learning.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

“My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe jog as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don't want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
― Jim Carrey

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

“…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.”
― Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise & Before Sunset: Two Screenplays

“The heart lies to itself because it must.”
― Jack Gilbert

“I have very carefully studied Islam and the life of its Prophet (PBUH). I have done so both as a student of history and as a critic. And I have come to conclusion that Muhammad (PBUH) was indeed a great man and a deliverer and benefactor of mankind which was till then writhing under the most agonising Pain.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“We were the most humiliated people on earth and God gave us honour through Islam. If we ever seek honour through anything else, God will humiliate us again.”
― Umar ibn Al-Khattab

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhane ke liye aa
aa phir se mujhe chhod ke jaane ke liye aa..
Pahale se maraasim na sahii phir bhi kabhi tou
rasm-o-rahe duniya hi nibhane ke liye aa..
Kis kis ko batayenge judaai ka sabab ham
tu mujhse khafaa hai tou zamaane ke liye aa..
kuch tou mere pindaar-e-mohabbat ka bharam rakh
tu bhi to kabhi mujh ko manaane ke liye aa..
ek umr se hoon lazzat-e-giriyaa se bhi maharuum
aye raahat-e-jaan mujh ko rulaane ke liye aa..
ab tak dil-e-khushfeham ko tujh se hain ummiden
ye aakharii shammen bhi bujhaane ke liye aa ....”
― Ahmed Faraz

“I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“صغيرٌ يطلبُ الكِبرا .. وشيخٌ ود لو صَغُرا
وخالٍ يشتهي عملا ً.. وذو عملٍ به ضَجِرا
ورب المال في تعب .. وفي تعب من افتقرا
وذو الأولاد مهمومٌ .. وطالبهم قد انفطرا
ومن فقد الجمال شكي .. وقد يشكو الذي بُهِرا
ويشقى المرء منهزما .. ولا يرتاح منتصرا
ويبغى المجد في لهفٍ .. فإن يظفر به فترا
شُكاةٌ مالها حَكَمٌ .. سوى الخصمين إن حضرا
فهل حاروا مع الأقدار .. أم هم حيروا القدرا ؟”
― عباس محمود العقاد

“كلُّ الحوادثِ مبدأُها من النظر ......ومُعظَمُ النارِ مِنْ مُستَصْغرِ الشَرِرِ
كْم نظرةٍ فعلتْ في قلب صاحبها........ فِعْلَ السهامِ بلا قوسٍ ولا وتـرِ
والمرءُ ما دامَ ذا عينٍ يُقَـلِبُها ..........في أَعينِ الغِيرِ موقوفٌ على خَطرِ
يَسرُّ مُقلَتَهُ ما ضرَّ مُهجَـتَهُ .........لا مرحباً بسرورِ عادَ بالضـررِ”
― أبو الطيب المتنبي

“One cannot make bargains for blisses
Or catch them like fishes in nets
And sometimes the things that life misses
Help more than the things that it gets. ”
― Alice Carey

“So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”
― Alain de Botton

“Now let me tell you something.

I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.

I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.

I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.

I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.

I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.

I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things.

But—

All this I did without you. This was my loss.

All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.

All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.”
― Gerald Durrell

“I’m not waiting until my hair turns white to become patient and wise. Nope, I’m dyeing my hair tonight.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale