“If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love... Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous... for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.”

“You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?”

“And ever since then, even though I was growing up in a land that had been tormented since the dawn of time, I refused to consider the world as a battlefield. I could see that wars beget wars, that reprisals follow reprisals, but I forbade myself to give them any support of any kind. I didn’t believe in prophesies of discord, and I couldn’t bring myself to accept the notion that God could incite his subjects to take up arms against one another and reduce the exercise of faith to an absurd and frightening question of power relationships.And ever since then, I’ve trusted anyone who required a little of my blood to purify my soul about as much as I would trust a scorpion. I have no desire to believe in valves of tears or valleys of shadows- there are other more charming and less irrational features of the landscape all around me. My father said, “Anyone who tells you that a greater symphony exists than the breath in your body is lying. He wants to undermine your most beautiful possession: the chance to profit from every moment of your life. If you start from the principle that your worst enemy is the very person who tries to sow hatred in your heart, your halfway to happiness. All you have to do is reach out your hand and take the rest. And remember this: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn’t more important than other people’s lives”

“The can take everything you own- your property, your best years, all your joys, all your good works, everything down to your last shirt- but you'll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world.”

“Misery is a dead end that stops at a brick wall. If you want to escape it, you must back out carefully, never taking your eyes off the wall. That way, it looks as though the wall is receding.”

“When dreams are turned away, death becomes the ultimate salvation….There are only two extremes in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It’s a question of accepting one’s madness…or suffering it.”

“He took a fine fresh fig from his pocket and washed it meticulously in a glass of water; then he peeled it open before our eyes. Inside, the beautiful fig was crawling with maggots. The imam concluded his lesson by saying, ‘It’s not a question of washing your bodies, but your souls, young men. If you’re rotten inside, neither rivers nor oceans will suffice to make you clean.”