Muhammad Habib

“it helps to think of ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with inventive, out-of-the-blue problem solving; interpersonal cluelessness combined with uncanny intuition and empathy; the list goes on.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies

“Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronisation might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.”
“Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way a person has of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry and sensitive; they really may have the humour and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature that everyone – not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts – but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.
The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The bet cure for love is to get to know them better.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“كيف تطلع الشيطان على عورتك؟: كان يقال: إن الله تعالى قد يأمر بالشيء ويبتلي بثقله وينهى عن الشيء، ويبتلي بشهوته. فإذا كنت لا تعمل من الخير إلا ما اشتهيته، ولا تترك من الشر إلا ما كرهته، فقد أطلعت الشيطان على عورتك، وأمكنته من رمتك[65]، فأوشك أن يقتحم عليك فيما تحب من الخير، فيكرهه إليك، وفيما تكره من الشر، فيحببه إليك. ولكن ينبغي لك في حب ما تحب من الخير التحامل على ما يستثقل منه، وينبغي لك في كراهة ما تكره من الشر التجنب لما يحب منه.”
― عبد الله بن المقفع, الأدب الصغير والأدب الكبير

“But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love