Ahmad A. > Ahmad's Quotes

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

“The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.”
― Les Brown

“It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.”
― Alfred Adler

“Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men. Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that. A rite of passage must reflect a real change in status and responsibility for it to be anything more than theater. No reimagined manhood of convenience can hold its head high so long as the earth remains the tomb of our ancestors”
― Jack Donovan, The Way of Men

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
― Rumi

“Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”
― Rumi

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“أولادكم ليسوا لكم
أولادكم أبناء الحياة المشتاقة إلى نفسها, بكم يأتون إلى العالم, ولكن ليس منكم.
ومع أنهم يعيشون معكم, فهم ليسوا ملكاً لكم.
أنتم تستطيعون أن تمنحوهم محبتكم, ولكنكم لا تقدرون أن تغرسوا فيهم بذور أفكاركم, لأن لهم أفكارأً خاصةً بهم.
وفي طاقتكم أن تصنعوا المساكم لأجسادكم.
ولكن نفوسهم لا تقطن في مساكنكم.
فهي تقطن في مسكن الغد, الذي لا تستطيعون أن تزوروه حتى ولا في أحلامكم.
وإن لكم أن تجاهدوا لكي تصيروا مثلهم.
ولكنكم عبثاً تحاولون أن تجعلوهم مثلكم.
لأن الحياة لا ترجع إلى الوراء, ولا تلذ لها الإقامة في منزل الأمس.
أنتم الأقواس وأولادكم سهام حية قد رمت بها الحياة عن أقواسكم.
فإن رامي السهام ينظر العلامة المنصوبة على طريق اللانهاية, فيلويكم بقدرته لكي تكون سهامه سريعة بعيدة المدى.
لذلك, فليكن التواؤكم بين يدي رامي السهام الحكيم لأجل المسرة والغبطة.
لأنه, كما يحب السهم الذي يطير من قوسه, هكذا يحب القوس الذي يثبت بين يديه.”
― جبران خليل جبران, The Prophet

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
― Henri Bergson

“If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the game