ـ "... إن فى الإنسان منطقة عجيبة سحيقة لا تصل إليها الفضيلة ولا الرذيلة ، ولا تشع فيها شمس العقل والإرادة ، ولا ينطق لسان المنطق ، ولا تطاع القوانين والأوضاع ، ولا تتداول فيها لغة أو تستخدم كلمة ... إنما هى مملكة نائية عن عالم الألفاظ والمعاني ... كل مافيها شفاف هفاف يأتي بالأعاجيب فى طرفة عين ... يكفي أن ترن فى أرجائها نبرة ، أو تبرق لمحة ، أو ينشر شذا عطر ، حتى يتصاعد من أعماقها فى لحظة من الإحساسات والصور والذكريات ، ما يهز كياننا ويفتح نفوسنا على أشياء لا قبل لنا بوصفها ، ولا بتجسيدها ، ولو لجأ إلى أدق العبارات و أبرع اللغات ... " ـ

توفيق الحكيم

Within man lies a deep wondrous spot, to which neither virtue nor vice can reach. Upon which the sun of reason and will never rise. In which the mouth of logic never speaks, the laws and rules are never obeyed, and not a language is used nor a word is ever spoken.
It is a distant Kingdom, beyond words and meanings. With everything is a sheer murmur offering wonders in a blink. From the depths of which, suffice a single tone or a flash of mind or a scent of a perfum, to allow rise of emotions, pictures and memories, a rising that will shake our being and open ourselves to things we can neither describe nor materialize even if we used the most refined of phrases or the most skillful of languages.

Tawfiq Al-Hakim.
(My humble transalation of the arabic text)

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Love ,lost or found

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
Blaise Pascal

Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Jane Austen

Love is the beauty of the soul.

Saint Augustine

When love is not madness, it is not love.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Jung

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Thomas Carlyle

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
Plato

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
George Bernard Shaw

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anais Nin

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.
Emily Dickinson

2 comments:

قبل الطوفان said...

Love is the puzzle which we try to solve for the rest of our life. We cannot expect it or even imagine where it is leading us, so maybe we should just enjoy the ride

No Arabic opinion about love among your choices!

Mmm! said...

Again i totally agree with you :)

It Is a puzzle that we try to solve for the rest of our life. It can't be expected or predicted.

But maybe we'd better not bother try solving it for a long time and just enjoy the ride as you said. It is the light that it brings into our souls that matters, searching the source of this light won't help much.

For the Arabic quotes exclamation , usually when it comes to quotes , unlike you sir :) i don't have time to dig my books and come up with the extracts i like, so i search over the net for quotes about a keyword. And always the quotes are for western thinkers. The only arab i find is Gobran Khalil Gobran, and as much as i like his words in arabic, his words in english, probably translated, are not that much good for me !

Another obstacle is that searching for anything that has to do with arabic literature is like hell to me. I can't find anything, i mean i can read whole english novels online and i can't even find a proper mini biography about someone like "Tawfiq el Hakim " in arabic , maybe in french or english , but not in arabic. I stumble in pages an pages about singers and dancers even ,i mean the real names and birthdays of actors and dancers are a Big Issue for us the arabs, but not a single word about a writer i really like Yehia Haqy !!!! can u bleive it !!!
This thing kills me, but maybe i can help by adding extrcts of what i like of the arabic literature. I'll work on this :) to light a candle ...

Thank you for bringing it up.