Quotes by Lebanese Authors - Page 10

Imagination sees the complete reality, - it is where past, present and future meet... Imagination is limited neither to the reality which is apparent - nor to one place. It lives everywhere. It is at a centre and feels the vibrations of all the circles within which east and west are virtually included. Imagination is the life of mental freedom. It realizes what everything is in its many aspects ... Imagination does not uplift: we don't want to be uplifted, we want to be more completely aware.
Kahlil Gibran
The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.
Amin Maalouf
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.
Kahlil Gibran
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
Kahlil Gibran
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.
Rabih Alameddine
That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you,and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh. I knew that when I first saw you. It was destiny. We are together like this and nothing can shake us apart.
Kahlil Gibran
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good, you are only loitering and sluggard.
Kahlil Gibran
Life is but a sleep disturbed By dreaming
Kahlil Gibran
Worry is a down payment on a problem you may never have. It doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, just empties today of its strength.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance.
Gad Saad
the desperate need to belong is perhaps never as great as during adolescence. Advertisers seek to communicate with teenagers by frequently using that powerful appeal.
Gad Saad
Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope.
Gad Saad
Never allow society to turn you into a person you are not.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Society is going to judge you no matter what you do.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
What reader or dreamer doesn’t imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read?
Rawi Hage
I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?
Rabih Alameddine
Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.
Rawi Hage
Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Kahlil Gibran
A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You might give them your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.
Kahlil Gibran
You may give them your love but not your thougts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Kahlil Gibran
Some of you say, 'Joy is greater thar sorrow,' and others say, 'Nay, sorrow is the greater.'But I say unto you, they are inseparable.Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Kahlil Gibran
Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Kahlil Gibran
In your winter you deny your spring,
Kahlil Gibran
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,the more joy you can contain.Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran
Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.
Rabih Alameddine
Everyone lives in a proverbial music video for a few hours. Then they leave the blinged out universe of faux-independence and fleeting adulthood and return to their parents’ homes. Their parents’ homes replete with marble floors and gold chandeliers and expectations of virginal daughters.
Nasri Atallah
Age is just reality we create for ourselves.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.
Rabih Alameddine
When love beckons to you, follow him,Though his ways are hard and steep.And when his wings enfold you yield to him,Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.And when he speaks to you believe in him,Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
Kahlil Gibran
Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Kahlil Gibran
Passion was the antithesis of morality.
Rabih Alameddine
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may livethrough its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.
Kahlil Gibran
Believing is a fine thing, but putting those beliefs into execution is a test of strength.
Kahlil Gibran
Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face.
Kahlil Gibran
Maybe we ran out of words, maybe we don't know what to say, maybe we both want to go our separate ways, maybe we want to speak up but we're afraid. All I know is this feeling isn't fading away.
Dalal Gebara
If only there was a way to escape this reality, if only there was a way to erase all this formality, if only there was a way to figure out your mentality, if only there was a way to rid all the theatricality, if only...however sadly all we think of is practicality, so we will never reach any finality.
Dalal Gebara
Beauty is a thing of might and dread.Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.
Kahlil Gibran
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
Kahlil Gibran
A negative mind will never give you a positive life.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Real problems in life are those related to your wellbeing and the wellbeing of your loved ones... Everything else is NOT a problem!
Samer Chidiac
I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.
Rabih Alameddine
Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.
Rabih Alameddine
By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.
Rabih Alameddine
You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.
Rabih Alameddine
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
Kahlil Gibran
If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?
Kahlil Gibran
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
Kahlil Gibran
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Kahlil Gibran
roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
Gad Saad
Normal is gross
Jack Barakat
I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.
Serj Tankian
As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music.
Kahlil Gibran