Duha > Duha's Quotes

“Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one's faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.”
― Elif Shafak, The Architect's Apprentice

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.”
― Peter De Vries

“You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing-rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood – for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You have to wait together – for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained...and exhausted. So that...

That in effect was love.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us”
― Pablo Neruda

“Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“عَرَفْتُ الهَوى مُذ عَرَفْتُ هواك
وأغْلَقْتُ قَلْبي عَلىٰ مَنْ عَاداكْ
وقُمْتُ اُناجِيـكَ يا مَن تـَرىٰ
خَفايا القُلُوبِ ولَسْنا نراك
أحِبُكَ حُبَيْنِ حُبَ الهَـوىٰ
وحُبْــاً لأنَكَ أهْـل ٌ لـِذَاك
فأما الذي هُوَ حُبُ الهَوىٰ
فَشُغْلِي بذِكْرِكَ عَمَنْ سـِواكْ
وامّـا الذي أنْتَ أهلٌ لَهُ
فَلَسْتُ أرىٰ الكَوْنِ حَتىٰ أراكْ
فلا الحَمْدُ في ذا ولا ذاكَ لي
ولكنْ لكَ الحَمْدُ فِي ذا وذاك”
― رابعة العدوية

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The Line makes itself felt,-- thro' some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself as heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,-- sound, sky, vegetation,-- may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,-- does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“لا ينبغي ربط المنافع الأخروية للناس مع المنافع الدنيوية لرجال الدين”
― عبدالكريم سروش

“I'd rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox.”
― Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano: & Other Plays

“In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world.”
― Yves Bonnefoy

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems