Emile Habiby Quotes

In the so-called age of ignorance before Islam, our ancestors used to form their gods from dates and eat them when in need. Who is more ignorant then, dear sir, I or those who ate their gods?
You might say: "It is better for people to eat their gods than for the gods to eat them."
But I'd respond: "Yes, but their gods were made of dates."
--The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist ~ Emile Habiby

But what about the secret I bear?" I asked.
"Tell it to the world," he advised.
And that is what I am doing. ~ Emile Habiby

So I knew then that she loved me; and I therefore loved her. I have always known that I will inevitably fall in love with any woman who loves me. ~ Emile Habiby

She [Sidonie Rougon] never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself. ~ Emile Zola

We are all geniuses when we dream. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Even evil and evil-doing can be overcome by suggestion. ~ Emile Coue

An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal. ~ Emile Faguet

Everything is pathology, except for indifference. ~ Emile M. Cioran

His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty. ~ Emile Zola

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity. ~ Emile M. Cioran

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays. ~ Emile M. Cioran

That's really good for an actor - to like the people behind the scenes - because then you treat the camera differently. If you really like someone who's shooting you, you're more open. You're not defensive, you're more relaxed, and I think that translates into a more interesting, natural performance. ~ Emile Hirsch

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time. ~ Emile M. Cioran

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual. ~ Emile M. Cioran

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it. ~ Emile Durkheim

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors? ~ Emile Zola

Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends. ~ Laura Riding

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist. ~ Emile Zola

This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality ... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it ... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life. ~ Emile Durkheim

I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty. ~ Emile Durkheim

A winetaster carries his tasting equipment with him wherever he goes, but it is at home that it is most finely tuned. ~ Emile Peynaud

Those who believe in their truth
the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men
leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter. ~ Emile M. Cioran

I'm a very, very conservative driver. ~ Emile Hirsch

My work is based on a tradition quite distinct from the Eckersberg tradition, a Nordic line of development that had never been clearly and consistently defined in the literature on art. This line is not a straight one; it has the strangest and most fascinating twists and curves, and includes such artists as Edvard Munch, Ernest Josephson, Hill , Hansen Jacobsen, Johannes Holbek, Jens Lund, and Emile Nolde. Not all of them equally well known. ~ Asger Jorn

To live ... in any sense of the word ... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence. ~ Emile M. Cioran

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men. ~ Emile M. Cioran

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg. ~ Emile Zola

Do glassmakers not have the ability to knead their own agates, marbles and rock crystals? ~ Emile Galle

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand. ~ Emile Durkheim

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever. ~ Emile M. Cioran

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. ~ Emile Durkheim

What everyone agreed was not very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruined it. At least the men did go into the street to do it; Lorilleux and Poisson, when they felt queer, managed to dash as far as the pork-butcher's shop. Breeding always tells. ~ Emile Zola

After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy ~ Emile Zola

Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized. ~ Emile Durkheim

These people came into the world and left it bound to their soil, proliferating on their own dung-hills with slow deliberation like the uncomplicated soul of trees which scatter their seed about their feet, with little conception of any larger world beyond the dun rocks among which they vegetated. ~ Emile Zola

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Women speak in the superlative. ~ Emile Souvestre

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others. ~ Emile Gaboriau

Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves. ~ Emile Durkheim

Under each formula lies a corpse. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally. ~ Emile Durkheim

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise. ~ Emile M. Cioran

We prove what we want to prove, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove. ~ Emile Chartier

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it. ~ Emile Durkheim

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance. ~ Gerhard Falk