Even trees of different species show solidarity with one another regardless of their differences, which is more than you can say for so many humans.
When you first became a father, you assumed your child was an extension of yourself. He gave you pride, and a sense of achievement and rootedness, until you came to realize, little by little, that a child was a being of his own making. He would keep to his own destiny, no matter how much you wished, prompted or forced him to follow in your footsteps.
I’m perpetually in a limbo. Maybe I want too many things at once and nothing passionately enough.
Sanity was a promised land, the Shangri-la she had been deported from as a teenager, and to which she intended to return to one day.
Intellect and love are made of different materials,” he said. “Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy,’ whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble.
Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference.
It is not up to us to judge and measure each other’s devoutness.
She never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of her, plain and inevitable.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the humans’ hierarchies?
It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God. I.
If enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth.
As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.
Humeyra believed there was something markedly similar about the experience of being overweight and being prone to melancholy. In both cases society blamed the sufferer. No other medical condition was regarded this way.
There’s no such thing as a small god. Once somebody starts playing God, sooner or later, things will get out of hand.
In the name of religion they are killing God.
No wonder the Prophet Muhammad said, “In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants.
Granting an equal vote to the ignorant is like handing matches to a toddler.
What we are going through is also a crisis of meanings.
If God was with you all along, why did you rummage around this whole time in search of Him? Because although it is a fact that He cannot be found by seeking, only those who seek can find Him.
I have often wondered what resides in an accent. Is it a presence – an identity, a trajectory, a history? Or is it rather an absence – an estrangement, a withdrawal, a blank space refusing to be filled?