Alia Makki > Alia's Quotes

“Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her.”
― Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis

“For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God's will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We don't heal in isolation, but in community.”
― S. Kelley Harrell, Gift of the Dreamtime - Reader's Companion

“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”
― Edith Wharton

“What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.”
― George MacDonald, The Wise Woman and Other Stories

“He needed so much to weep. All the distrust of life which misfortunes had brought to the little Värmland boy needed tears to wash it away. Distrust that love and joy, beauty and strength blossomed on the earth, distrust in himself, all must go, all did go, for it was Easter; the dead lived and the Spirit of Fasting would never again come into power.”
― Selma Lagerlöf, Invisible Links

“But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”
― André Gide, Journals 1889-1949

“It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.”
― James Oppenheim

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera

“قال الخليل بن أحمد : الرجال أربعة، رجل يدري ويدري أنه يدري فذلك عالم فاتبعوه، ورجل يدري ولا يدري أنه يدري فذلك نائم فأيقظوه، ورجل لا يدري ويدري انه لا يدري فذلك مسترشد فأرشدوه، ورجل لا يدري أنه لا يدري فذلك جاهل فارفضوه.”
― أبو حامد الغزالي, إحياء علوم الدين

“We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“There is nowhere morning does not go.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“أصل كل معصية وغفلة وشهوة الرضا عن النفس، وأصل كل طاعة ويقظة وعفة عدم الرضا عنها، لأن تصحب جاهلا لا يرضى عن نفسه خير لك من أن تصحب عالما يرضى عن نفسه
فأى علم لعالم يرضى عن نفسه؟ وأى جهل لجاهل لا يرضى عن نفسه "؟”
― محمد الغزالي, الجانب العاطفي من الإسلام

“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical".”
― C S Lewis

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore