Osman Quotes

In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you. So I’m putting today in my pocket and I’m off to bed.

You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever takes your fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children.

And if one is never lost in life, then clearly one has never traveled anywhere interesting.

You always know when it’s your first time, don’t you? But you rarely know when it’s your final time.

It was a well-known fact that there were no calories in homemade cakes.

People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny.

The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am.

And remember, you shall suffer all things and again suffer: until you have sufficient sufferance to accept all things.

It’s great to be the fastest runner, but not when you’re running in the wrong direction.

More women are murdering people these days,” says Joyce. “If you ignore the context, it is a real sign of progress.

Many years ago, everybody here would wake early because there was much to do and only so many hours in the day. Now they wake early because there is much to do and only so many days left.

...There are silly, proper tears now. I'll let them fall. If you don't cry sometimes, you'll end up crying all the time.

Well, imagine if we only ever did what we were supposed to,

If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.

If murder were easy, none of us would survive Christmas.

Some people love their children more than they love their partner,’ says Ibrahim, ‘and some people love their partner more than their children. And no one can ever admit to either thing.

We all have a sob story, but we don't all go around killing people.

Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity

You are simply a little lost, Donna. And if one is never lost in life, then clearly one has never traveled anywhere interesting.

But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fibre starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.

Darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. Yet you are still in great company - the Numen and your Genius with all their media, and your host of elementals and ghosts of your dead loves — are there! They need no light by which to see, no words to speak, no motive to enact except through your own purely formed desire.

Everyone wants to feel special, but nobody wants to feel different,

Why diet at eighty-two?” says Joyce. “What’s a sausage roll going to do to you? Kill you? Well, join the queue.

He’s all the things that can go wrong with men if you leave them to their own devices.

Some people in life, Sue, are weather forecasters, whereas other people are the weather itself.

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

Donna has always been headstrong, always acted quickly and decisively. Which is a fine quality when you are right, but a liability when you are wrong. It’s great to be the fastest runner, but not when you’re running in the wrong direction.

People love to sleep, and yet they are so frightened of death.

Always look where the action isn't, because that's where the action is.

The sun is up, the skies are blue, and murder is in the air

At least I have discovered that online dating is not for me. You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.

Thank you so much for reading The Thursday Mystery Club. Unless you haven’t read it yet and have just turned straight to the acknowledgments, which I accept is a possibility. You must live your life as you choose.

Don’t get a small dog though, Joyce,’ says Ron. ‘Small dogs are like small men: always got a point to prove. Yapping it up, barking at cars.

because you know that getting out of a garden chair at our age is a military operation. Once you are in one, you can be in it for the day.

It was a community, and in Ibrahim's opinion that was how human beings were designed to live. At Coopers Chase, anytime you wanted to be alone, you would simply close your front door, and anytime you wanted to be with people, you would open it up again. If there was a better recipe for happiness than that, then Ibrahim was yet to hear it.

Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.

I'm afraid I don't know WTF. I only discovered LOL from Joyce last week

Have you ever shot anyone before?’ Rosie asks Steve, while snapping through Amy’s cable ties. ‘No,’ says Steve. ‘But the Coldplay T-shirt made it easier.

In our solitariness... great depths are sometimes sounded. Truth hideth in company.

I know the difference between alone and lonely,

There are scars, yes, but that at least means the bleeding has stopped.

Everyone who dies is alive. We call people "dead" because we need a word for it, but "dead" just means that time has stopped moving forward for that person? You understand? No one dies, not really.

Revenge is not a straight line, it’s a circle. It’s a grenade that goes off while you’re still in the room, and you can’t help but be caught in the blast.

Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

I know from experience that grief rides alone.

We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn't fall behind. But it doesn't, you see. Time just swirls around us. Every thing is always present. The things we've done, the people we've loved, the people we've hurt, they're all still here?

Of all the things to lose, to lose one's mind? Let them take a leg or a lung; let them take anything before they take that. Before you become "poor Rosemary" or "poor Frank," catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they were. Before there were no more trips, no more games, no more Murder Clubs. Before there was no more you.

Logic, when used correctly and by an intellect that is not corrupted by the lower passions, may lead to one to the Transcendent itself.

Was he a content man, doing the things he liked alone? Or was he a lonely man making the best out of what he had? Alone, or lonely?

What is it about Christmas? Everything that’s wrong seems worse, and everything that’s right seems better.

God cries every time someone lies to a Canadian.

No regrets. We live our lives forwards, not backwards. So always make the best of what's in front of you.

You must die before your children, of course, because you have taught them to live without you. But not your dog.

As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn’t in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening now. That’s crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn’t a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences.

Others believe in prayer . . . . have not all yet learnt, that to ask it to be denied? Let it be the root of your Gospel. Oh, ye who are living other peoples lives! Unless desire is subconscious, it is not fulfilled, no, not in this life. Then verily sleep is better than prayer. Quiescence is hidden desire, a form of "not asking"; by it the female obtains much from man.

It was the perfect trip, and as far as Stephen was concerned, the whole weekend was one magical accident. And that's because he is the weather, and I am the weather forecaster. He believes in fate, while I am fate.

Daughter, I want you to form the most intense, loving relationship with yourself. Only then will you realize your capacity for kindness and emotional expansiveness. Daughter, after you have formed this relationship with yourself, I want you to love others with the openness and humility that you always embodied as a child. Daughter, I want you to forgive easily, laugh loudly and never allow yourself to become the invisible, silent woman that your mother was. Daughter, this is how we soften our hearts and become better human beings.

If life ever seems too complicated, if you think no one can help, sometimes the right person to turn to is an eight-year-old.

If you don’t cry sometimes, you’ll end up crying all the time.

Very few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else’s life.

I don’t know why we’re on this earth,” says Stephen. “Truly I don’t. But if I wanted to find the answer, I would begin with how much I love you.

Day after day, mission after mission, ridding the world of evil? Waiting for the last devil to die? What a joke. New devils will always spring up, like daffodils in springtime.

If you have any sort of personality, someone will eventually want to kill you.

I would never have therapy, because who wants to unravel all that knitting? Not wroth the risk, thank you. My daughter, Joanna, has a therapist, although you'd be hard-pressed to know why if you saw the size of her house.

I have been Googling, but there’s not much out there. I got so desperate I even used Bing,

We complain about life so endlessly and so bitterly, and yet we cling to it so dearly? Surely that makes no sense?

You got to be careful with money. Don't let it be in charge.

Mankind finds futility very hard to stomach. People find all sorts of things to give their brief lives meaning. Religion, football, astrology, social media. Valiant efforts all, but everyone knows, deep, deep down, that life is both a random occurrence and a losing battle. None of us will be remembered. These days will all be covered, in time, by the sands.

Other than damnation I know no magic to satisfy your wishes; for ye believe one thing, desire another, speak unlike, act differently and obtain the living value.

At one point he brushed my hand and there was electricity, but I think that was the combination of the deep carpet outside the restaurant and my new cardigan.

Had she really understood then that those were the best of times? That she was in heaven? She thinks she did understand, yes. Understood she had been given a great gift. Doing the crossword in a train carriage, Stephen with a can of beer ("I will only drink beer on trains, nowhere else, don't ask me why"), glasses halfway down his nose, reading out clues. The real secret was that when they looked at each other, they each thought they had the better deal.

Days of death are days when we weigh our relationship with love in our bare hands. Days when we remember what has gone, and fear what is to come. The joy love brings, and the price we pay. When we give thanks but also pray for mercy.

You know when you look into someone's eyes for the first time and the whole world breaks apart And you just think, "Of course, of course, this is what I've been waiting for all this time"?

It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it is also perfectly understandable why the purification of the soul is considered an integral part of the methodology of knowledge.

It’s the people, in the end, isn’t it?” says Viktor. “It’s always the people. You can move halfway around the world to find your perfect life, move to Australia if you like, but it always comes down to the people you meet.

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing. The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way. 1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection. 2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora. 3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.

The learning of ‘How’ is the eternal ‘Why’ – unanswered! A genius is such, because he does not know how or why.

People drift in and out of your life, and, when you are younger, you know you will see them again. But now every old friend is a miracle.

Steve is grateful that at least he feels loved. Because if you don’t feel loved, it’s difficult to feel anything at all.

The one law of Art is its own spontaneity, its pleasure and freedom. How mystic, pure and simple is its wish; it has no idea of potential divinity! Decoration is its creed and vital allegory is its belief. Being the ‘Free Morality,’ it has no sin – then most assuredly Art is all we dare express without excuse.

Manic depression — or bipolar disorder — is like racing up to a clifftop before diving headfirst into a cavity. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the psychic equivalent of an extreme sport. The manic highs — that exhilarating rush to the top of the cliff — make you feel bionic in your hyper-energized capacity for generosity, sexiness and soulfulness. You feel like you have ingested stars and are now glowing from within. It’s unearned confidence-in-extremis — with an emphasis on the con, because you feel cheated once you inevitably crash into that cavity. I sometimes joke that mania is the worst kind of pyramid scheme, one that the bipolar individual doesn’t even know they’re building, only to find out, too late, that they’re also its biggest casualty.

I'm afraid I don't know WTF. I only discovered LOL from Joyce last week. I'm going to assume that it doesn't refer to the Warsaw Transit Facility, as that was shut down in 1981 when the Russians came sniffing.

The only seed that needs regular watering is our imagination.

Alas!’ he writes, ‘I am morbid, And have put a purple colour about my brow. All men seem eating and drinking the “Joy of the Round Feast,” while I am Melancholy and silent, as though in a Gloomy wood, astray. Strange images of myself did I create, As I gazed into the seeming pit of others, Losing myself in the thoughtfulness Of my unreal self, as humanity saw me. But alas ! on entering to the consciousness Of my real being to find fostering "The all-prevailing woman,” And I strayed with her, into the path direct. “Hail! the Jewel in the Lotus.

reject expressed belief – and exchange it for the possibility of genuine change.The believers’ formula is a deception and they are deceived – which is a negation of their purpose. Faith is denial, and the metaphor for faith is idiocy, hence it always fails. To make their power more secure, governments force religion down the throats of their slaves, and it always succeeds. Few people escape it; therefore the honour of those who do is all the greater. When faith perishes, the ‘Self ’ comes into its own.

Everyone is taking the best shot they’ve got, and some shots are just luckier than yours. Anytime you feel your unhappiness turning into bitterness, you have to check yourself. You can live with unhappiness, but bitterness will kill

It is fine to say ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ It is admirable. But it no longer applies when you’re eighty. When you are eighty, whatever doesn’t kill you just ushers you through the next door, and the next door and the next, and all of these doors lock behind you.

The real secret was that when they looked at each other, they each thought they had the better deal. But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fiber starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.

They say that time softens the pain, but that’s a fairy tale. Who would ever love again if anyone actually told the truth? I’m afraid there are some days when I could still rip out my own heart and weep myself hollow for Gerry. Some days? Every day.

So what do I do now?” “You climb the next mountain, of course.” “Oh, yeah, of course,” says Donna. Simple. “And what’s up the next mountain?” “Well, we don’t know, do we? It’s your mountain. No one’s ever climbed it before.” “And what if I don’t want to? What if I just want to go home and cry every night and pretend to everyone that everything’s okay?” “Then do that. Keep being scared, keep being lonely. And spend the next twenty years coming to see me, and I will keep telling you the same thing. Put your boots on and climb the next mountain. See what’s up there. Friends, promotions, babies. It’s your mountain.” “Will there be other mountains after that one?” “There will.

And, by the by, Joanna solved the mystery of my private messages. She went into my account and searched all of them for me. She told me that if I didn't want to be sent an endless tide of photographs of men's genitals, I should really change my username. Needless to say, I haven't changed it.

Quietism, Buddhism, and other religions, everything which denies the flesh—is the great inferiority to God in ourselves, an escapism seeking sanctuary through fear of life and inability to accept 'this reality'. They were hurt? Or was the odalisque unsatisfactory or too expensive? They expected too much for too little, or were too mean to pay—therefore: "All is illusion". But the Stoic smilingly awaits the next shower of shit from heaven. Stoics are not Saviours, Saints or Heroes and are often confused and weary, yet they prefer to find their own way and to accept life as they find it. The schizophrenics, the melancholics and psychotics—they at least are secretive and inflict no religions on others. They prove the possibilities and utilities of 'as if' when totally accepted.

Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it’s all about forward motion. It’s all about change. It’s all about that elusive state. Freedom.

She had used all the tricks in the book to encourage him, to convince him, to cajole him into looking after himself. But it turned out that, all along, the only real motivation he needed to change was to start having sex with her mum. You have to be so careful what you wish for.

So every day Elizabeth opens her diary to a date two weeks ahead and writes herself a question. And every day she answers a question she set herself two weeks ago. This is her early-warning system. This is her team of scientists poring over seismology graphs. If there is going to be an earthquake, Elizabeth will be the first to know about it.

He who deceives another deceives himself much more. Therefore know the Charlatans by their love of rich robes, ceremony, ritual, magical retirements, absurd conditions, and other stupidity, too numerous to relate. Their entire doctrine a boastful display, a cowardice hungering for notoriety; their standard everything unnecessary, their certain failure assured. Hence it is that those with some natural ability quickly lose it by their teaching. They can only dogmatise, implant and multiply that which is entirely superficial. Were I a teacher I should not act as master, as knowing more, the pupil could lay no claim to discipleship. Assimilating slowly, he would not be conscious of his learning, he would not repeat the vital mistake; without fear he would accomplish with ease. The only teaching possible is to show a man how to learn from his own wisdom, and to utilise his ignorance and mistakes. Not by obscuring his vision and intention by righteousness. 

Dear Stephen,’ he begins. ‘This is a difficult letter to write, but I know it will be a great deal more difficult to read. I will come straight to it. I believe you are in the early stages of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s.’ Elizabeth can hear her heart beating through her chest. Who on earth has chosen to shatter their privacy this way? Who even knows? Her friends? Has one of them written? They wouldn’t dare, not without asking. Not Ibrahim, surely? He might dare. ‘I am not an expert, but it is something I have been looking into. You are forgetting things, and you are getting confused. I know full well what you will say – “But I’ve always forgotten things. I’ve always been confused!” – and you are right, of course, but this, Stephen, is of a different order. Something is not right with you, and everything I read points in just one direction.’ ‘Stephen,’ says Elizabeth, but he gently gestures for hush. ‘You must also know that dementia points in just one direction. Once you start to descend the slope, and please believe me when I say you have started, there is no return. There may be footholds here and there, there may be ledges on which to rest, and the view may still be beautiful from time to time, but you will not clamber back up.’ ‘Stephen, who wrote you this letter?’ Elizabeth asks. Stephen holds up a finger, asking her to be patient a few moments more. Elizabeth’s fury is decreasing. The letter is something she should have written to him herself. This should not have been left to a stranger. Stephen starts