Rhaeela > Rhaeela's Quotes

“In love, there is no distinction between success and failure. If love remains then even separation is union otherwise even union is separation.”
― Wasif Ali Wasif

“Sometimes you search so hard for words. You look for a way to interpret the language of this heart and the unspoken bond you feel. But in the end you are left with nothing but silence. And deep down you hope it’s understood.”
― Yasmin Mogahed

“It is hard to explain to a privileged child the difference between freedom and captivity. For him, the world functions differently, all rains bear fruits and all men are free. He catches a golden bird and puts it inside a gold cage. He watches it grow, captivated, unaware that with its beautiful body comes a pair of wings that can set it free.”
― Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust

“I have learned the beauty of childhood, now. Every trivial thing holds great significance. You are sensitive and vulnerable to everything around you; you notice the changing leaves and all the colors in the rainbow. Every conversation leaves a brilliant imprint on your mind.”
― Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust

“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”
― Basil the Great

“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”
― Li-Young Lee

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...”
― Virginia Woolf

“Constantine cursed the faujis again, and then he cursed Tom Cruise for having made that bloody Top Gun movie. Since then, an entire generation of faujis had grown up thinking they could be like him just by buying those cheap rip-off sunglasses for 200 rupees from Zainab Market.”
― Omar Shahid Hamid, The Prisoner

“Thinking about the weaknesses or faults of others is forbidden, whether they are present or not. The Prophet said, “There is a tree in Paradise reserved for one whose own faults preoccupied him from considering the faults of others.”
― Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart

“If athletes include as part of their training the visualization of their sport and mentally picturing themselves going through all the steps required for success, how then can believers fail to visualize what is more important and consequential than sport? People of spiritual elevation prepare themselves psychologically for the ultimate journey. Although death is a sudden severance from this life, one remains conscious in a different way. In fact, the deceased is in a hyperconscious state that makes this life appear like a dream. ʿAlī ibn AbīṬālib, may God be pleased with him, said, “People are asleep. When they die, they wake up.”
― Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart

“Without discipline, Religion would be impossible”
― Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart

“We live in the age of Noah (a.s.) in the sense that a flood of distraction accosts us. It is a slow and subtle drowning. For those who notice it, they engage in the remembrance of God. The rites of worship and devotion to God's remembrance (dhikr) are planks of the ark. When Noah (a.s.) started to build his ark, his people mocked him and considered him a fool. But he kept building. He knew what was coming. And we know too.”
― Hamza Yusuf, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart

“People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that. Well, I hope, for the sake of God, that I have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don't change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing and its knowledge should be expanding.”
― Hamza Yusuf

“And when the day is done
I will follow you into the sun.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 2

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”

<...>

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
― T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

“But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I will wait by the gate until I see your face. I have waited a decade, haven't I, in this limited life? Waiting in the endless one would be no sacrifice. And Inshallah one day, I know I will see you approaching. You will look just as you did at twenty, that year you first left us, and I will also be as I was in my youth. We will look like brothers on that day. We will walk together, as equals.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us