Abdelkhalek Benallou > Abdelkhalek's Quotes

“J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie,
Et mes amis et ma gaieté;
J'ai perdu jusqu'à la fierté
Qui faisait croire à mon génie.

Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,
J'ai cru que c'était une amie ;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en étais déjà dégoûté.

Et pourtant elle est éternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignoré.

Dieu parle, il faut qu'on lui réponde.
Le seul bien qui me reste au monde
Est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré.”
― Alfred De Musset

“Chaque âge a ses plaisirs, son esprit et ses mœurs.

Un jeune homme, toujours bouillant dans ses caprices,
Est prompt à recevoir l'impression des vices ;
Est vain dans ses discours, volage en ses désirs,
Rétif à la censure et fou dans les plaisirs.

L'âge viril, plus mûr, inspire un air plus sage,
Se pousse auprès des grands, s'intrigue, se ménage,
Contre les coups du sort songe à se maintenir,
Et loin dans le présent regarde l'avenir.

La vieillesse chagrine incessamment amasse ;
Garde, non pas pour soi, les trésors qu'elle entasse ;
Marche en tous ses desseins d'un pas lent et glacé ;
Toujours plaint le présent et vante le passé ;
Inhabile aux plaisirs, dont la jeunesse abuse,
Blâme en eux les douceurs que l'âge lui refuse.”
― Nicolas Boileau

“Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.”
― Alfred De Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one's self.”
― Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam: The Concept of Religion and The Foundation of Ethics and Morality

“إنمـا الأمـم الأخلاق مـا بقيـت


فإن هم ذهبت أخلاقـهم ذهبــواً”
― أحمد شوقي

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Our shouting is louder than our actions,
Our swords are taller than us,
This is our tragedy.
In short
We wear the cape of civilisation
But our souls live in the stone age”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Aujourd'hui, on cherche partout à répandre le savoir; qui sait si, dans quelques siècles, il n'y aura pas des universités pour rétablir l'ancienne ignorance?”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Dieses Und Jenes: Aufsätze Und Aphorismen

“It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.”
― Francis Bacon

“Il faut avoir l'esprit dur et le coeur sensible”
― Jacques Maritain

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
― Francis Bacon

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings.”
― Al-Ghazali

“Praise be to God; whose compassion is all-embracing and Whose mercy is universal; Who rewards His servants for their remembrance [dhikr] [of Him] with His remembrance [of them] - verily God (Exalted is He!) has said, 'Remember Me, and I will remember you' - Opening lines from Kitab al-Adhkar wa'l Da'awat of the Ihya ulum ad-Din”
― al-Ghazali

“…a man should say to his soul every morning, "God has given thee twenty-four treasures; take heed lest thou lose anyone of them, for thou wilt not be able to endure the regret that will follow such loss.”
― Al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness

“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

“Whoever says that all music is prohibited, let him also claim that the songs of birds are prohibited.”
― Imam Al-Ghazzali

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
― Rumi, Masnavi i Man'avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula