Top 100 Naguib Mahfouz Quotes
#1. I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees.
Naguib Mahfouz
#2. As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.
Naguib Mahfouz
#3. Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.
Naguib Mahfouz
#4. I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.
Naguib Mahfouz
#5. History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Naguib Mahfouz
#6. If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.
Naguib Mahfouz
#7. It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.
Naguib Mahfouz
#8. The shaykh interrupted him, saying, Not so fast. I'm the sort of person who praises only to clear the way to speak the truth, for the sake of encouragement, son of Abd al-Jawad
Naguib Mahfouz
#9. When disasters come at the same time, they compete with each other.
Naguib Mahfouz
#10. A priest's life is spent between question and answer
or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.
Naguib Mahfouz
#11. We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.
Naguib Mahfouz
#12. It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.
Naguib Mahfouz
#13. As for life's tragedies, our love will defeat them. Love is the most effective cure. In the crevices of disasters, happiness lies like a diamond in a mind, so let us instill in ourselves the wisdom of love.
Naguib Mahfouz
#14. The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.
Naguib Mahfouz
#16. According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment.
Naguib Mahfouz
#17. We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.
Naguib Mahfouz
#18. Despite dissimilarities in our luck and success at looking after ourselves, we are all human beings.
Naguib Mahfouz
#19. The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
Naguib Mahfouz
#20. A crazy country, choking air, polluted hearts, treachery. Treachery and treason.
Naguib Mahfouz
#21. Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought.
Naguib Mahfouz
#22. Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
Naguib Mahfouz
#24. Muhammad Iffat has an inflexible, Turkish mentality but a heart of gold.
Naguib Mahfouz
#25. No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer
Naguib Mahfouz
#27. He knew Muhammad Iffat was of Turkish descent and stubborn as a mule.
Naguib Mahfouz
#28. Every inch a person's body travels on the road of separation seems like miles to the heart.
Naguib Mahfouz
#29. I want a world where hearts are not deceived and do not deceive others.
Naguib Mahfouz
#30. I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.
Naguib Mahfouz
#31. Excessive concern with religion seems to me a last resort for people who have been exhausted by life.
Naguib Mahfouz
#34. After living for a month in his home, her character had been infected with the virus of submission to his will, which terrified everyone in the house.
Naguib Mahfouz
#35. Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz
#36. The One God fashioned women to expose the elements men are made of said Queen Nefertiti.
Naguib Mahfouz
#37. Don't go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.
Naguib Mahfouz
#39. An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune.
Naguib Mahfouz
#40. I want a world where men live free from fear and coercion.
Naguib Mahfouz
#41. They had a relaxed look about them, appropriate for people going to a peaceful demonstration sanctioned by the authorities.
Naguib Mahfouz
#42. He shook his head sadly. 'What a fool you are. You've wasted your ability searching for something that doesn't exist.'
'When will you realize you don't exist?
Naguib Mahfouz
#43. The criminal is trying to solve his immediate problems.
Naguib Mahfouz
#44. My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize.
Naguib Mahfouz
#45. I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday, and in the afternoon, I eat.
Naguib Mahfouz
#47. I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.
Naguib Mahfouz
#49. Hosni Mubarak ... his constitution is not democratic, but he is democratic. We can voice our opinions now. The press is free.
Naguib Mahfouz
#50. God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.
Naguib Mahfouz
#51. We wont develop until we accept that reading is a vital necessity.
Naguib Mahfouz
#52. The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.
Naguib Mahfouz
#53. I now believe that people are bustards with no ethics. It would be better for them to admit it and build their communal life on that admission. The new ethical issue becomes how to maintain public welfare and human happiness in a society of bustards and scum
Naguib Mahfouz
#54. Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.
Naguib Mahfouz
#55. Love is like health. It is taken lightly when present and cherished when it departs.
Naguib Mahfouz
#56. Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
Naguib Mahfouz
#57. But not to take a step forward is to take two steps backward", Abnum protested.
~ Before the Throne
Naguib Mahfouz
#58. I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz
#59. The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.
Naguib Mahfouz
#60. I was afraid of marriage. I had the impression married life would take up all my time. I saw myself drowning in visits and parties. No freedom.
Naguib Mahfouz
#61. We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems.
Naguib Mahfouz
#62. It's not surprising that truly humanitarian manifestos originate frequently in minority circles or with people whose consciences are troubled by the problems of minorities.
Naguib Mahfouz
#63. If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.
Naguib Mahfouz
#64. I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.
Naguib Mahfouz
#66. I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Naguib Mahfouz
#67. I consider Khomeini's position dangerous. He does not have the right to pass judgment-that is not the Islamic way.
Naguib Mahfouz
#69. There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.
Naguib Mahfouz
#70. Death by love is fairer by far than death by illness, said Amenhotep III.
Naguib Mahfouz
#71. In the calculus of good deeds you have the most to gain.
Naguib Mahfouz
#72. Watch out, brother. Turkish women end up going crazy.
Naguib Mahfouz
#73. When will the state of the country be sound? ... When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.
Naguib Mahfouz
#74. One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
Naguib Mahfouz
#77. At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.
Naguib Mahfouz
#78. You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
Naguib Mahfouz
#79. You know what I'm afraid of? That God is sick of us.
Naguib Mahfouz
#80. Paraphrasing..Science is the language of the intellect of society. Art is language of the entire human personality.
Naguib Mahfouz
#81. Death is more merciful than hope itself! There is nothing surprising in this, for death is divinely appointed, while hope is the creation of human folly. Both end in frustration. Am I destined to lead a life of endless frustration?
-(The Beginning and the End)
Naguib Mahfouz
#82. Why don't we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?
Naguib Mahfouz
#83. What do you have to say as a devout Muslim concerning your lust for women?
Naguib Mahfouz
#84. I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.
Naguib Mahfouz
#85. My wife thought I deserved it, but I always thought the Nobel a Western prize.
Naguib Mahfouz
#86. When we're in love, we may resent it, but we certainly miss love once it's gone.
Naguib Mahfouz
#87. Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.
Naguib Mahfouz
#88. Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.
Naguib Mahfouz
#89. There is no alternative to action, and that requires faith. The issue is how we are to mold for ourselves a belief system that is worthy of life.
Naguib Mahfouz
#90. In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.
Naguib Mahfouz
#91. Falseness in life is the secret that makes man's inner self a rare truth; it hides from him although it's obvious to all.
Naguib Mahfouz
#92. I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.
Naguib Mahfouz
#93. Isn't it sad that a man of no significance like this marriage clerk should impede the progress of your life? But a lowly worm eats the corpses of the most exalted individuals.
Naguib Mahfouz
#94. It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.
Naguib Mahfouz
#96. If life has no meaning, why don't we create a meaning for it?
Naguib Mahfouz
#97. I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.
Naguib Mahfouz
#98. The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.
Naguib Mahfouz
#99. I've never worked in politics, never been a member of an official committee or a political party.
Naguib Mahfouz
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