Arabian Nights Quotes

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

عجيبة هذه السلطنة بناسها وعفاريتها..ترفع شعار الله وتغوص في الدنس !!

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

هذا الكون مثقل بالحماقة

قال الشيخ: - يا صديقي لا عيب فيك غير أنك تُغالي في تسليمك للعقل. - إنه زينة الإنسان. - من العقل أن نعرف حدود العقل.

A loss that can be repaired by money is not of such very great importance.

من غيرة الحق أن لم يجعل لأحد إليه طريقاً، ولم يؤيس أحداً من الوصول إليه، وترك الخلق في مفاوز التحير يركضون، وفي بحار الظن يغرقون، فمن ظن أنه واصل فاصله، ومن ظن أنه فاصل مناه، فلا وصول ولا مهرب عنه، ولا بد منه

كل من عليها فان إلا وجهه، ومن يفرح بالفاني فسوف ينتابه الحزن عندما يزول عنه ما يفرحه. كل شيء عبث سوى عبادته. الحزن والوحشة في العالم كله ناجم عن النظر إلى كل ما سوى الله.

ويل للناس من حاكم لا حياء له.

Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only. She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.

إذا سلمت منك نفسك فقد أديت حقها، وإذا سلم منك الخلق فقد أديت حقوقهم.

من كان سروره بغير الحق فسروره يورث الهموم، ومن لم يكن أنسه في خدمة ربه فأنسه يورث الوحشة.

Glory be to Him who changes others and remains Himself unchanged!

تعلمت أيضا يا مولاي أن الحرية حياة الروح، وأن الجنة نفسها لا تغني عن الإنسان شيئا إذا خسر حريته.

جرت المقادير بأن يوجد عاقل واحد في كل مدينة مجنونة.

You'll tell me a story and I'll spare you ? You think I don't see what you're doing ? I've read Arabian Nights." "Call me Scheherazade, baby ! Actually, she's one tricksy bitch. Who, by the way, still owes me twenty gold pieces and a pound of sesame.

WHOEVER TALKS ABOUT WHAT DOES NOT CONCERN HIM, OFTEN HEARS WHAT DOES NOT PLEASE HIM!

اصبر. الفهم لا يتيسر إلا مع الزمن. أود أن أراك من جنود الله لا من دراويشه.

A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy.

Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.

Declan and Regin: "You'll tell me a story and I'll spare you? You think I don't see what you're doing? I've read Arabian Nights." "Call me Scheherazade, baby! Actually, she's one tricksy bitch. Who, by the way, still owes me twenty gold pieces and a pound of sesame.

الحزن والوحشة في العالم ناجم عن النظر إلى كل ما سوى الله.

Stories are a communal currency of humanity.

My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.

نحن نكابد أشواقا لا حصر لها لتقودنا في النهاية إلى الشوق الذي لا شوق بعده، فاعشق الله يغنك عن كل شيء.

الحكمة مطلب عسير. إنها لا تورث كما يورث العرش.

إذا أردت أن تكون في راحة فكُلّ ما أصبت، والبس ما وجدت، وارض بما قضى الله عليك.

فقال بصوت ارتفع درجة في هدأة الليل: فلا تكن من قرناء الشياطين. فتساءل مدفوعا بشوق ساخن: من هم قرناء الشياطين؟ فأجابه الشيخ: أمير بلا علم وعالِم بلا عفة وفقير بلا توكل، وفساد العالَم في فسادهم.

The heart is a place of secrets...

لم أعد أبحث عن قلوب البشر.

المُنطلَق من الإيمان دائما وأبدا. الطريق واحد في الأول ثم ينقسم بلا مفر إلى اتجاهين: أحدهما يؤدي إلى الحب والفناء والآخر إلى الجهاد. أما أهل الفناء فيخلّصون أنفسهم وأما أهل الجهاد فيخلّصون العباد.

Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious.

Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated.

Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.

قال شهريار وكأنما يناجي نفسه: علّمتْني شهرزاد أن أصدّق ما يكذّبه منطق الإنسان، وأن أخوض بحرا من التناقضات، وكلما جاء الليل تبيّن لي أني رجل فقير!

ليس العلم بكثرة الرواية. إنما العلم من اتبع العلم واستعمله.

إنا قد نجيناك من الموت بالموت.

أراد أن يجيب إجابة خشنة تناسب المقام. أراد أن يجيب إجابة ناعمة تناسب المقام. لكنه غرق في الصمت.

We live in biological time, and we have beginnings, middles, and ends.

من رزق ثلاثة أشياء مع ثلاثة أشياء فقد نجا من الأفات، بطنٌ خالِ على قلبٍ قانع، وفقرُ دائم مع زهد حاضر، وصبرُ كامل مع ذكر دائم.

سبيل الله واضح ولا يجوز أن يخالطه غضب أو كبرياء.

Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.

قال الشيخ: اطلع الله على قلوب أوليائه فمنهم من لم يكن يصلح لحمل المعرفة حرفا فشغلهم بالعبادة.

لا تجيء إلا إذا دفعتك رغبة لا تقاوم.

اصبر، الفهم لا يتيسر إلا مع الزمن.

طوبى لمن تم له تحويل القلب من الأشياء إلى رب الأشياء.

قال الشيخ: اعلم أنك لا تنال درجة الصالحين حتى تجوز ست عقبات: أولاها أن تغلق باب النعمة وتفتح باب الشدة، والثانية أن تغلق باب العز وتفتح باب الذل، والثالثة أن تغلق باب الراحة وتفتح باب الجهد، والرابعة أن تغلق باب النوم وتفتح باب السهر، والخامسة أن تغلق باب الغنى وتفتح باب الفقر، والسادسة أن تغلق باب الأمل وتفتح باب الاستعداد للموت.

To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path

A truth once seen by a single mind ends up by imposing itself on the totality of human consciousness.

الجميع شغوفون بالسعادة و لكنها كالقمر المحجوب وراء سحب الشتاء

Curiosity and timidity fought a long battle in his heart.

Master of masters, O maker of heroes, Thunder the brave, Irresistible message: 'Life is worth living Through every grain of it From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.

ودافع عن نفسه أمام نفسه فقال إنه لم يكن شريرا ولكنه فعل ما فعل بدافع الحرمان والعجز. أعطاه الله حظ الفقراء وشهوات الأغنياء، فما ذنبه؟

إذا نامت الرّعيّة نام الخير والشر.

A funny thing happened on the way to my potential

If you need a hug, give it to someone else.

طوبى لمن كان همه هما واحدا و لم يشغل قلبة بما رأت عيناه و سمعت اذناه

It is amazing what women in love will do

There is nothing like a train journey for reflection.

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

if lies can save a man once, truth can save him twice.

وتسائل في قلق: هل بقيتُ في الحياة بمعجزة لأعمل حمّالا؟!

الإيمان الصادق أندر من العنقاء

We had the kind of conversations that only great friends can ever share. They were touched with magic.

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels.

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought. Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

الإبقاء على التقاليد البالية سخف ومهلك.

Nothing was really so important to my father as the achievement of selflessness. He rarely mentioned it directly, but tried to guide us to it in a roundabout way.

We shall remember ...... Damascus, the "Pearl of the East", the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights,the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten

لكل منا أب آخر والسعيد منا من يكتشفه.

Such misplaced faith in a boy with a murderous past and a girl with treacherous intent.

الوجود أغمض ما في الوجود

لابد أن يصل العاشق بالعقل او الجنون لابد ان يصل لكن ما أضيع الباحث

These days no one challenges us,' he said. 'And because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we have all become lazy.

In a world where you can be anything, be kind.

My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

يبوح الحائر بسره للغريب.

خُلق الإنسان ليكون صيادا.

إذا دعيتم لخير ادعيتم العجز،وإذا دعيتم لشر بادرتم إليه باسم الواجب !

Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.

مَن كان سُروره بِغير الحقّ فسُروره يُورثُ الهموم، ومَن لَم يَكن أُنسُه فِي خِدمةِ رَبّه فَأُنسُه يُورثُ الوحشة.

There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.

For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.

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Every challenge we’ve faced…every turn life has thrown at us…I’m reminded of the lessons I learned in those stories. Lessons of fate and destiny and how the impossible is worth fighting for, no matter how long it takes. But the biggest thing I learned,” he paused and swallowed, “and also, the most relevant…is that in all of the universe, there is only one moon. And you, Alaina Elizabeth Thomas, are my moon. You are my destiny. You are, my Arabian Nights. I am so thankful that in all the stories of the world, you chose to be mine.

إليك قول رجل مجرب قال: من غيرة الحق أن لم يجعل لأحد إليه طريقا، ولم يؤيس أحدا من الوصول إليه، وترك الخلق في مفاوز التحير يركضون، وفي بحار الظن يغرقون، فمن ظن أنه واصل فاصله، ومن ظن أنه فاصل تاه، فلا وصول ولا مهرب عنه، ولا بد منه.

Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

من ذل في نفسة رفع الله قدرة ،ومن عز في نفسة أذله الله في أعين عباده...

You know, when the list of people who have a really good reason to want you dead covers more than two sheets of paper, you might want to start rethinking your life choices.

من العقل أن نعرف حدود العقل

قال قمقام: - ما أطيب الزمن إذا جرى تحت رضا العناية؟ فقال سنجام: - إذا استقرت السكينة سمعت همسات الأزهار وهي تسبح بحمد الله. - ما ينقص الإنسان ليحظى بنعمة الزمان والمكان؟ - هذا ما يحيرني يا أخي، ألم يوهب العقل والروح؟

Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed.

اعلم إنك لا تنال درجة الصالحين حتى تجوز ست عقبات، أولاها: أن تغلق باب النعمة وتفتح باب الشدة، والثانية: أن تغلق باب العز وتفتح باب الذل، والثالثة: أن تغلق باب الراحة وتفتح باب الجهد، والرابعة: أن تغلق باب النوم وتفتح باب السهر، والخامسة: أن تغلق باب الغنى وتفتح باب الفقر، والسادسة: أن تغلق باب الأمل وتفتح باب الاستعداد للموت.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career

Scheherazade had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

Great Scott!” said Peter. “So it was the horn--your own horn, Su--that dragged us all off that seat on the platform yesterday morning! I can hardly believe it; yet it all fits in.” “I don’t know why you shouldn’t believe it,” said Lucy, “if you believe in magic at all. Aren’t there lots of stories about magic forcing people out of one place--out of one world--into another? I mean, when a magician in The Arabian Nights calls up a Jinn, it has to come. We had to come, just like that.” “Yes,” said Peter, “I suppose what makes it feel so queer is that in the stories it’s always someone in our world who does the calling. One doesn’t really think about where the Jinn’s coming from.” “And now we know what it feels like for the Jinn,” said Edmund with a chuckle. “Golly! It’s a bit uncomfortable to know that we can be whistled for like that. It’s worse than what Father says about living at the mercy of the telephone.

When you read The Arabian Nights you accept Islam. You accept the fables woven by generations as if they were by one single author or, better still, as if they had no author. And in fact they have one and none. Something so worked on, so polished by generations is no longer associated with and individual. In Kafka's case, it's possible that his fables are now part of human memory. What happened to Quixote could happen to to them. Let's say that all the copies of Quixote, in Spanish and in translation, were lost. The figure of Don Quixote would remain in human memory. I think that the idea of a frightening trial that goes on forever, which is at the core of The Castle and The Trial (both books that Kafka, of course, never wanted to publish because he knew they were unfinished), is now grown infinite, is now part of human memory and can now be rewritten under different titles and feature different circumstances. Kafka's work now forms a part of human memory.

In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better. ("Mysterious Maisie")