Motaz Alfarraj > Motaz's Quotes

“But have you ever felt that something was so good it couldn’t possibly last?”
― Kevin D. Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

“There isn’t any loving, romantic way to put this: I told Bonnie we needed to get married so she couldn’t testify against me, and also so she could visit me if I landed in jail, which was looking like the way things were headed.”
― Kevin D. Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

“I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.”
― Kevin D. Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

“It is really this “mathematical mindset” that seems to be most useful to those who are not trained to think as mathematicians.”
― Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

“in fact some of the best ideas come when you least expect them,”
― Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

“IQ is a statistical method for quantifying specific kinds of problem-solving ability, mathematically convenient but not necessarily corresponding to a real attribute of the human brain, and not necessarily representing whatever it is that we mean by ‘intelligence’.”
― Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

“in the last two years alone, more Americans died from gunshot wounds than were killed during the entire Vietnam War. By contrast, in all of Japan (with a population of 120 million people), the number of young men shot to death in a year is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single busy weekend.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intra-species violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it. We’d view it as a great perversion of natural law—but we wouldn’t deny it.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“learned that the time after a major incident offered a period of safety and the best rest,”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”
― Connie Willis, Passage

“The Bible Code, a 1998 bestseller, claimed that the bible contains predictions on the future events that you can find by skipping letters at regular intervals an assembling words from the letter you land on. Unfortunately, there are so many ways to do this that you're guaranteed to find "predictions" in any sufficiently long text.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“It's not man versus machine; it's man with machine versus man without. Data and intuition are like horse and rider, and you don't try to outrun a horse; you ride it.”
― Pedro Domingos

“We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive.”
― Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“Anyway, suffice it to say, the wall of the rover wasn’t made for sleeping on. But after a morning potato and Vicodin, I was feeling much better.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“ما زلت أؤمن
أن الانسان لا يموت دفعة واحدة
وإنما يموت بطريقة الأجزاء
كلما رحل صديق مات جزء
وكلما غادرنا حبيب مات جزء
وكلما قُتل حلم من أحلامنا مات جزء
فيأتي الموت الأكبر ليجد كل الأجزاء ميتة
فيحملها ويرحل”
― جبران خليل جبران

“A more promising hypothesis is that happiness comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to your desires. This idea was widespread in the ancient world: Buddha in India and the Stoic philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome all counseled people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance. This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“وشاع أن النبي عليه السلام قضى بقتله فتقدم ابنه، وقال له: «يا رسول الله، إنه بلغني أنك تريد قتل عبد الله بن أبي فيما بلغك عنه، فإن كنت فاعلًا فمرني به فأنا أحمل إليك رأسه. فوالله لقد علمت الخزرج ما كان بها من رجل أبر بوالده مني، وإني لأخشى أن تأمر به غيري فيقتله؛ فلا تدعني نفسي أنظر إلى قاتل أبي يمشي في الناس فأقتله فأقتل رجلًا مؤمنًا بكافر فأدخل النار.»”
― عباس محمود العقاد, ‫عبقرية محمد‬