Mesa Selimovic Quotes

#1. Give me strength to forgive. Because he who forgives is the greatest. And I know I cannot forget.

Mesa Selimovic

#2. I'm bad without personal benefit, and good only when I'm irresponsible. Sort of a sinful angel, an immoral virgin, an honest criminal.

Mesa Selimovic

#3. Cruelty in the name of kindliness is terrible; it would bind our feet and hands; it would kill us with hypocrisy. Cruelty based on power is better - that we can at least hate.

Mesa Selimovic

#4. I was mistaken. Not because he would have hidden anything from me, but because he was a deep and shadowy well, whose bottom could not be seen easily. And not because he in particular was like that, but because people are like that in general, unfathomable as soon as we get to know them better.

Mesa Selimovic

#5. What is the devotion if there is no temptation which is master on their own? The man is not God and his strength is just in that to suppress its nature, if there is nothing to suppress what's the difference?

Mesa Selimovic

#6. Sincerity is the certitude that we speak the truth (and who can be certain of that?), but there are many kinds of honesty, and they do not always agree with one another.

Mesa Selimovic

#7. Your dervish trade is strange. You sell words, which people buy out of fear or habit. He doesn't want to, or doesn't know how to sell words. He can't even sell silence. Or talent. And he doesn't care about success.

Mesa Selimovic

#8. People in fact talk most often for their own sake, and with a need to hear the echo of their words.

Mesa Selimovic

#9. Friendship is not chosen, he said, it happens, who knows why, like love. And I haven't bestowed anything on you, but on myself; I respect men who remain magnanimous even in their misfortune.

Mesa Selimovic

#10. When I came back, they gave me blank looks. Some said, 'I don't think I've seen you for days.' Some not even that. And I'd been away for ten years!

Mesa Selimovic

#11. And what never happened always seems beautiful. You are a deception that gives birth to discontent, a deception that I cannot and do not wish to drive away, since it disarms me and protects me from suffering with a quiet grief.

Mesa Selimovic

#12. I caught myself feeling that vile need for others to be grateful to us, to show themselves as small and dependent, because that is what creates our favor, nurtures it, and heightens the importance of our deeds and kindness.

Mesa Selimovic

#13. when people settle their accounts, guilt is easy to find, and justice is the right to do whatever we think must be done, and therefore justice can be anything.

Mesa Selimovic

#14. Two genuinely human thoughts are always different, just as two men's palms are."
"What's a genuinely human thought?"
"One that's usually not told to anyone.

Mesa Selimovic

#15. The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word.

Mesa Selimovic

#16. I swear on time, which is the beginning and the end of everything, that everybody is always at lost ...

Mesa Selimovic

#17. People easily forget what they're not proud of.

Mesa Selimovic

#18. I'm slowly becoming a repository for decomposing sorrows, regrets, ignored injustice, and forgotten promises. I can still feel its stench. But when I get accustomed to it, I will call it experience.

Mesa Selimovic

#19. What is the purpose of piety if there are no temptations to resist? Man is not God, his strength is the ability to restrain his own nature, so I thought, and if he has nothing to restrain, then what are his merits?

Mesa Selimovic

#20. Fear is flooding over me, like water.
The living know nothing. Teach me, dead ones, how to die without fear, or at least without horror. Because death is senseless, as is life.

Mesa Selimovic

#21. The earth is uninhabitable, like the moon, and we only delude ourselves thinking that it's our true home, since we have no other place to go. The earth is good for those who are irrational or invulnerable.

Mesa Selimovic

#22. Life always sinks downward. It takes effort to avoid that.

Mesa Selimovic

#23. A CHILD SPOKE ABOUT HIS FEAR, LONG AGO. IT RESEMBLED A little song:

In the attic
there's a beam that hits you on the head,
there's a wind that bangs the shutters,
there's a mouse that peeps out of the corner.

Mesa Selimovic