Samina Shafik > Samina's Quotes

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

“God is with the broken-hearted. When your heart breaks, it's a good thing - the breaking of the heart is what opens it up to the light of Allah. The dunya is designed to break your heart, so crush it.”
― Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.”
― Théophile Gautier

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

“Nothing happens until something moves.”
― Albert Einstein

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
― Albert Einstein

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
― Albert Einstein

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”
― Andre Gide

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi , The Essential Rumi

“She wanted to explain everything to him—how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“How different would people act if they couldn't show off on social media? Would they still do it?”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”
― May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal

“One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep ... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”
― May Sarton

“It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“To be everywhere; is to be nowhere”
― Seneca the Elder