Sajid Zaidi

“Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind”
― Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I carried 12 magazines for my AK. Eight of these I carried in a four-pocket combat vest. I put two magazines in each pocket. That was my body armor. I carried an additional magazine on my back, directly covering my heart and another on my side protecting my kidney. I carried six hand grenades strapped across my stomach. So my arsenal was also my flak vest. It wasn’t perfect, but good enough.”
― Dodge Billingsley, Fangs of the Lone Wolf: Chechen Tactics in the Russian-Chechen War 1994–2009

“Remember, knowledge is better than wealth, because knowledge protects you, while you have to guard wealth. Wealth decreases if you spend it, but the more you make use of knowledge, the more it increases. What you get through wealth is gone when wealth is gone, but what you achieve through knowledge will remain even after you are gone.
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Those who amass wealth, though alive, are dead to the realities of life, and those who acquire knowledge will live, by virtue of their knowledge and wisdom, even after their death.”
― Imam Ali (Peace be upon him)