Bassem Tarek > Bassem's Quotes

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.”
― Voltairine de Cleyre

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Strenuous Life

“Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.”
― Jonathan Swift

“My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”
― Epicurus

“Condoms ribbed for extrasensitivity. The last thing I need is extrasensitivity. Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours. This seems to really miss the point. I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do yours.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.”
― Frederick Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim

“Your thighs are apple trees. Your knees are the southern breeze.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.”
― Machado de Assis, Iaiá Garcia

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”
― John Cage

“Bring the pure wine of
love and freedom.
But sir, a tornado is coming.
More wine, we'll teach this storm
A thing or two about whirling.”
― Rumi

“الباحثين عن الموت هم أكثر الناس بقاء”
― حجي جابر, سمراويت

“Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi

“The Supreme Arrogance of Religious Thinking:

That a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supecluster would look up at the sky and declare "it was all made so I could exist”
― Peter Walker

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
― Sir Richard Francis Burton

“I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.”
― Robert Sapolsky

“Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.”
― Thomas Carlyle