More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I Feel Sorry for the Garden No one is thinking about the flowers No one is thinking about the fish No one wants to believe that the garden is dying that the garden’s heart has swollen under the sun that the garden is slowly forgetting its green moments …
What we celebrate in Alamut is the ways in which the author reveals how any ideology can be manipulated by a charismatic leader and morph individual beliefs into fanaticism.
‘What is a person permitted, once he’s realized that truth is unattainable and consequently doesn’t exist for him?’
The truth is unknowable. Therefore we believe in nothing and have no limits on what we can do.’
Truth is unattainable to us, it doesn’t exist for us. What then is the proper response? If you’ve concluded that you can know nothing, if you don’t believe in anything, then everything is permitted, then follow your passions.
At every step they undermined me, and it was then I realized that the leadership was intentionally withholding the truth from the people and keeping them ignorant for selfish reasons.
Not just simple folk from the masses, even the more exalted minds preferred a tangible lie to an ungraspable truth.
All my attempts to enlighten individuals or groups came to nothing. Because truth, which for me stood at the summit of all values, was worthless to the rest of humanity.
‘Ultimate knowledge is impossible, because our senses lie to us. But they’re the only mediator between the things that surround us and our thoughts, our intellect.’
‘The masses have always been like that,’ Omar continued. ‘They’re afraid of uncertainty, which is why they prefer a lie that promises something tangible to even the most exalted truth if it doesn’t give them anything to hold on to.
“Cowards die a thousand times, a brave man only once,”
all faiths are equal in their accuracy or inaccuracy.
the quest for pleasure is the first and foremost purpose of life.
“Essentially, the power of any institution is predicated on followers who have been deceived.
But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.”
“Friend! Brother! Let me ask you, is there anything that makes a person braver than friendship?
