In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.
At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.
Despite dissimilarities in our luck and success at looking after ourselves, we are all human beings.
Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.
It is an indication of truth’s jealousy that it has not made for anyone a path to it, and that it has not deprived anyone of the hope of attaining it, and it has left people running in the deserts of perplexity and drowning in the seas of doubt; and he who thinks he has attained it, it dissociates itself from, and he who thinks he has dissociated himself from it has lost his way.
After living for a month in his home, her character had been infected with the virus of submission to his will, which terrified everyone in the house.
He was not accustomed to busying himself with introspection or self-analysis. In this way he was like most people who are rarely alone. His mind did not swing into action until some external force required it: a man or woman or some other element of his material life. He had surrendered himself to the busy current of his life, submerging himself totally in it. All he saw of himself was his reflection on the surface of the stream.
Take your fill, for you will not see again that which you are leaving. Every moment is the last.
A crazy country, choking air, polluted hearts, treachery. Treachery and treason.
No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer.
How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.
Patience in the face of the bitterness of misfortune is the door to the sweetness of intimate discourse.
Every inch a person’s body travels on the road of separation seems like miles to the heart.
A person who has forgotten his sorrows can be forced to confront them once more when someone with the best intentions favors him with a word of comfort.
There is no ‘truth and fiction’, but different kinds of truths that vary depending on the phases of life and the quality of the system that helps us become aware of them. Legends are truths like the truths of nature, mathematics and history. Each one has its spiritual system.
Memories pour heavily like rain... but it is up to you to channel them into a clear stream.
Thought is a double-edged blessing.
When we emigrate to the moon, we will be the first settlers ever to run from Nothingness to Nothingness.
All people seek refuge in the shade of the leafy tree, but when winter strips it bare they forsake it without regret.
A bit of superstition relieves the mind of the weight of facts and rigorous science.
The sages have said that a person does not merit the divine term ‘human’ until he is able to govern his lusts and his passions.