Quotes by Lebanese Authors - Page 11

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
If you keep fighting with yourself, you will always win.
Samer Chidiac
Make peace with your fears; after all, they are only imaginary friends.
Samer Chidiac
Worrying is like a man's beard, if you don't do something about it... it will keep growing.
Samer Chidiac
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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 potters oven?And is not the lute that soothes your spirits the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
Kahlil Gibran
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
Kahlil Gibran
Could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
Kahlil Gibran
He suffered much, but he understood the mystery of pain: he knew that tears make all things shine.
Kahlil Gibran
Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Kahlil Gibran
The school remained open. I thanked Allah that the Americans operated differently. Had the Lebanese lost 241 men in one day, and had we the power and the reach, we would have American males hung from their testicles and set on fire. The frame of mind that dictates our actions quashes our ability to develop the power and reach exhibited by the Americans, I thought.
Sam Wazan
In my dreams, I entered a world where success was based on ethics and proper dealings, not bribes and scams. My vision of sucess including marrying Sophia, having joyful children, unassuming friends, and warmhearted neighbors. I aspired for an environment where I would be valued for my good character, not the strength of my aggression. I wanted to leave West Beirut, the four square miles of a lesser world.
Sam Wazan
For the sight of the angry weather saddens my soul and the sight of the town, sitting like a bereaved mother beneath layers of ice, oppresses my heart.
Kahlil Gibran
Then a ploughman said , speak to us of work : in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life ,And to love life throught labour is to be intimate with inmost secrets .And what is it to work with love ?it is to weave the colth with threads from your heart , even as if your beloved were to wear that colth .It is to build a house with affection , even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house .It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy , even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit .It is to change all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit .He who works in marble , and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone , is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
Kahlil Gibran
When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,And what is it to work with love?It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.Work is love made visible
Kahlil Gibran
Speak not of peoples and laws andKingdoms, for the whole earth isMy birthplace and all humans areMy brothers.
Kahlil Gibran
let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.
Amin Maalouf
Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.
Rabih Alameddine
A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.And your body is the harp of your soul,And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.
Kahlil Gibran
Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
Kahlil Gibran
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Kahlil Gibran
Beauty isin't judged by the size of your jeans.
Jack Barakat
Life's too awesome to waste your time thinking about someone who doesn't treat you right.
Jack Barakat
Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a win attached to a claw,But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil.Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.
Kahlil Gibran
True beauty is a rayThat springs from the sacred depths of the soul,and illuminates the body, just as lifesprings from the kernel of a stone andgives colour and scent to a flower.
Kahlil Gibran
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
Kahlil Gibran
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
Kahlil Gibran
Don't trust people whose feelings change with time... Trust people whose feelings remain the same, even when the time changes.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
The professors in the academy say, “Do not make the model more beautiful than she is,” and my soul whispers, “O if you could only paint the model as beautiful as she really is.
Kahlil Gibran
Men who do not forgive women their little faults will never enjoy their great virtues.
Kahlil Gibran
If they don't appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.
Najwa Zebian
Tolerance is love sick with the sickness of haughtiness.
Kahlil Gibran
For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?
Kahlil Gibran
But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you? You who travel with the wind, what weathervane shall direct your course? What man's law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door? What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chains? And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path? People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?
Kahlil Gibran
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fullfilment. you should be free indeed when your days are not without care nor your nights without a word and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked unbound.
Kahlil Gibran
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.
Kahlil Gibran
Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.
Kahlil Gibran
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
Kahlil Gibran
When you were a wandering desire in the mist, I too was there, a wandering desire. Then we sought one another, and out of our eagerness dreams were born. And dreams were time limitless, and dreams were space without measure.
Kahlil Gibran
I believe love is like war: we only know how it starts, and nobody knows how it will end.
Jabber Douaihy
A woman protested saying, "Of course it was a righteous war. My son fell in it.".
Kahlil Gibran
Sometimes you just need to distance yourself from people. If they care, they'll notice. If they don't, you know where you stand.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?
Rabih Alameddine
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit. For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
Kahlil Gibran
Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. […]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
Rabih Alameddine
Often you shall think your road impassable, sombre and companionless. Have will and plod along; and round each curve you shall find a new companion.
Mikhail Naimy
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live.For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.And in th sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Kahlil Gibran
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
Kahlil Gibran
You might be on the right track, but you can't just stand there!
Samer Chidiac
Sometimes you can't walk your dream journey. Find a way!
Samer Chidiac
When you dive into your past, remember to go back up quickly.
Samer Chidiac
Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.
Kahlil Gibran
Don’t get stressed over the little things and make sure you live life to the fullest.
Jack Barakat
I want a God that makes me twirl.' I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it would flow like a robe. 'Like this. I can do this for God.' I held my hands out. I twirled and twirled and twirled. 'Look,' I said. 'Look.
Rabih Alameddine
...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me -- just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable....
Amal El-Mohtar
I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.
Rabih Alameddine
Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?
Joumana Haddad