Manzoor Elahi

“I repeat my motto: poco spero, nulla chiedo.” Little I hope, nothing I ask.”
― Candice Millard, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

“Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, in Egypt, where he boasted that he descended directly from a god, in sixteen generations. But the priests reacted with him precisely as they also did with me (though I myself did not boast my own lineage): they brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me colossal wooden figures. They counted these statues, showing me that they were precisely the number they had previously told me. Custom was that every high priest set up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each high priest succeeded his father. They went through the whole line of figures, from the statue of the man who had most recently died, back to the earliest. Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five. The priests refused to believe that a man could be descended from a god in only sixteen generations; they refused to believe that a man could be born before a god. And all those men whose statues stood there had been good men, but not gods.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Each time that we—as a nation, a group, a continent, or a religion—look inward in celebration of our specific identity, we do nothing but lionize our own limits and sing of our own stupidity. Each time that we open ourselves to diversity and ponder that which is different from us, we enlarge the richness and intelligence of the human race. A Ministry of National Identity, like those established of late in some Western countries, is nothing more than a ministry of national obtuseness.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“One time, at the final hockey game of his senior year, against rival Beverly at the hockey rink in Lynn, the score was tied at two after regulation. Jack had scored both goals for Salem. The game went into overtime, but shortly thereafter, Jack’s team lost. It was the team’s seventh loss in a row. Jack was pissed. He threw his hockey stick in anger, then skated to get the stick and marched off to the locker room.

Next thing he knew, his mother was in the locker room, too. She bounded right up to him, oblivious to the fact that the guys around her were in various states of undress. She grabbed him by the jersey in front of everyone. “You punk,” she yelled at him. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you don’t belong anywhere.” He paused for a moment, recalling the memory. “She was a powerhouse,” he said. “I loved her beyond comprehension.”
― William D. Cohan, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon