Karim M.Z.

“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“أخشى فى قمة الحب من الفقد”
― بهاء طاهر, الحب في المنفى

“لأنك ضحكتَ
نحن في الوجود
ضحكت يوما ً
فتفجرت من ضحكتك الناس والأطفال.”
― زياد الرحباني, صديقي الله

“إِلى كَم ذا التَخَلُّفُ وَالتَواني..
وَكَم هَذا التَمادي في التَمادي؟
وَشُغلُ النَفسِ عَن طَلَبِ المَعالي؛
بِبَيعِ الشِعرِ في سوقِ الكَسادِ.”
― أبو الطيب المتنبي