Quotes by Egyptian Authors - Page 4

[T]he world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks ever to defile the soil of this planet... [You] must never take them seriously, which is exactly what they want.
Albert Cossery
There is a fine line between any contradictory matters. When our souls fail to spot it before our minds, we lose track of both reality and vision in which lead to a one way ticket for an unknown path
Rola Mahmoud
Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
You speak good words, child, but sometimes what lies within is much darker. The line between justice and revenge is then. Justice is order; revenge is chaos. If revenge is your innermost desire, you will be destroyed upon entering into the hall
Amira Aly
The rulers were using ancient knowledge to manipulate the amygdaloidal primal fear. They ruled through fear, preternatural fear created through soft, invisible waves designed to alternate the brain’s almond. They kept the people spellbound
Amira Aly
We loved with every organ but the heart.
André Aciman
How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.
André Aciman
Eye contact: how souls catch fire.
Yahia Lababidi
The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.
Hermes Trismegistus
It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.
Athanasius of Alexandria
Misery is a scar on the soul, that if it begins in childhood, it lasts the whole lifetime. I understand that no two scars are alike, but I also ask myself; even if these scars are not alike, aren’t these things engraved on our souls signed by which we know each other?Aren’t we also alike?
Bahaa Taher
For the Word, realizing that in no other way would the corruption of human beings be undone except, simply, by dying, yet being immortal and the Son of the Father of the Word was not able to die, for this reason he takes to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and through the indwelling Word would remain incorruptible, and so corruption might henceforth cease from all by the grace of the resurrection.
Athanasius of Alexandria
Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.
Naguib Mahfouz
The sign of a beautiful person is that they always see beauty in others.
Omar Suleiman
Oh...why has time changed us?
Naguib Mahfouz
Daughter, I’m not crying now because I’m fed up or regret that the Lord created me a woman. No, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m sad about my life and my youth that have come and gone without my knowing how to live them really and truly as a woman.knowing how to live them really and truly as a woman.
Alifa Rifaat
To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.
Mona Eltahawy
How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like a snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.
Nawal El-Saadawi
It's as if our being academic equals means we must be inadequate wives and mothers,' says Noura.All of these girls have been called 'intimidating' and 'outspoken' by their Muslim counterparts, simply for being themselves. Their accomplishments usually leave men feeling emasculated, they say.'It's still going to take Muslim men a couple more generations to catch up and realise girls like us want love, not money,' says Ayesha.
Sabrina Mahfouz
You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--
Ahdaf Soueif
The regime's policies, whether intentionally or unintentionally, had engendered a sharp divide between Muslims and Christians, in spite of the fact that generations of Muslims and Coptic Christians had lived together peacefully in the past. The regime was good at utilizing this divide to create a perception that without Mubarak in power, Egyptians would break out into sectarian warfare. As a result, Mubarak managed to market his police state successfully to the international community as the lesser of two evils.
Wael Ghonim
The 'fires'n that produce thick, rarely innocent, often strategic smoke should therefore be scrutinized. they should be known and identified; and when they involve dishonesty, lies, or manipulation, they they should be ignored.
Tariq Ramadan
If you distance yourself from reality and just cling to cliches about democracy find yourself a different job than analyzing politics
Hany Ghoraba
If there is a smoke, there is a fire, the saying goes, That is quite true, but one should find what the fire is, and who lit it.
Tariq Ramadan
I have learned that one should say "Peace!" to those who shout their hatred for one's being and presence or at one's passage.
Tariq Ramadan
I want a world where men live free from fear and coercion.
Naguib Mahfouz
Questions that will free you might have answers that will imprison you again.
Nema Al-Araby
People are naturally born as Libertarians till governments and oppressive societies force them to adopt their ideologies and their ways.
Hany Ghoraba
When you have a dream and someone makes promises they keep breaking, it is hard to recover. You lose hope.
Yasmine El Rashidi
And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
Omar El Akkad
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
Omar El Akkad
Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.
Omar El Akkad
Housing without people, and people without housing.
Milad Hanna
Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.
Abba Poemen
Love transforms pleasure into pain.
Al-Busiri
This is an instance of the truism that, when switching from one recording medium to another, there is always a considerable data loss. As the Roman empire declined, continuing preservation of early texts would be dependent on the efforts of the book copyists in the Middle Ages - and good luck. Are there any resemblances to our current digitization concerns?
Sara Ayad
The replacement of independent bookstores by firms such as Barnes & Noble, Waterstones or Borders superficially provided a wide range of reading, but their policies further limited choice.
Sara Ayad
[T]he people who are close to Allah worry so much about wasting time that they call themselves to account for every breath they spend - how many of us wonder about how we spend our day, let alone each breath?
Ethar El-Katatney
But things change, people change, Gaby. Otherwise what would be the point of living?
Soheir Khashoggi
You are on your own now , you have always been & you shall forever be .
Omneya Yasser
Was it always to be like this? she wondered. A moment of joy followed by a new sorrow?
Soheir Khashoggi
Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
Nawal El-Saadawi
Killing people in the name of religion does not make it religious.
Youssef Ziedan
What has he found who has lost God?And what has he lost who has found God?
Ibn 'Ata'illah al-Iskandari
Write when you least feel like it,Because that's when you write best.
Nema Al-Araby
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
Edmond Jabès
Intellect is a part of a good faith. Intellect is the light, the heart is the direction.
Tariq Ramadan
Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men...?
Athanasius of Alexandria
The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...
Ramez Naam
I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.
Nawal El-Saadawi
He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.
Athanasius of Alexandria
How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they'd learn to put up with because they couldn't quite disown them.
André Aciman
I wish I knew how to calibrate my kiss the way he did but passion allows us to hide more.
André Aciman
As the sun began to rise, the man reached out to the woman, and they clasped hands. He cradled her, and languidly they lifted themselves up to their feet, their bodies brushing, their eyes lost in each other's. Sensuously, deliberately, they danced, moving as though they were one, their body language smooth as their limbs carefully unfolded. They twirled and rocked, intertwined and separated, nearly leaning onto one another but barely touching, their movements sometimes tender, sometimes almost violent...Moments passed while the dancers held tight to each other, as though their bodies were melting together. The expression on their features as they lifted their faces to the sky was one of unimaginable joy.
Hannah Fielding
He emerged out of the lake, the declining sun drenching him with aureate light, the droplets on his body iridescent in their beams. He walked confidently toward her, almost every inch of his sculptured body exposed in his black swimsuit. Each sharp contour of muscle glistened, each limb unfolded with lithe grace as he approached, his eyes riveted on her. Coral watched spellbound, a yearning surging up within her, eager and expectant. The air around them trembled with infinite anticipation.
Hannah Fielding
Gradually the mist had lifted, and the sun burst forth, a ball of fire radiating the sky with unnaturally incandescent hues. Coral was reminded of the strident brushwork and wild colours of the Fauvist paintings that filled her mother's gallery, which Coral had always loved. The scene was now set for the show to begin: the drama in which the broad, breath-taking landscapes of Africa were the stage and the animals the actors.
Hannah Fielding
Time was of no consequence and I just hoped that eternity would start now. The person I used to be had suddenly ceased to exist. I was melting and being remodeled into nothing but the hand he was just holding right now.
Amira Aly
There are easy ways to bring back summer in the snowstorm
André Aciman