Top 100 Elif Shafak Quotes
#1. Three scents accompany my memories of this place: cut wood, poppy-seed bread, and the soft, crisp smell of snow.
Elif Shafak
#2. When asked his name, he introduced himself as Shams of Tabriz and said he was a wandering dervish searching for God high and low.
Elif Shafak
#3. Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of
Love, living is a burden - as you have seen.
Elif Shafak
#4. Either grant me the bliss of the ignorant or give me the strength to bear the knowledge.
Elif Shafak
#5. But the story didn't end there. Almost 800 years later, the spirits of Shams & Rumi are still alive today,whirling amid us somewhere ...
Elif Shafak
#6. Learn the truth, my friend, but be careful not to make a fetish out of your truths.
Elif Shafak
#7. The water that scares you rejuvenates me. For me I can swim, and swim I shall.
Elif Shafak
#8. If you carry a sword, you obey the sword, not the other way round. Nobody can hold a weapon and keep their hands clear of blood at the same time.
Elif Shafak
#9. Loneliness was an inseparable part of being human.
Elif Shafak
#10. It had just hit her why and how people could fall in love with Istanbul, in spite of all the sorrow it might cause them. It would not be easy to fall out of love with a city this heartbreakingly beautiful. With
Elif Shafak
#11. An aura surrounds every living thing, an aura in a different colour each time. Do you know what colour is yours?
Elif Shafak
#12. But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die
Elif Shafak
#13. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love.
Elif Shafak
#14. East, West, South or North makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey, a journey within. If you travel within, you'll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
Elif Shafak
#15. Beyond wildest dreams, strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected.
Elif Shafak
#16. You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.
Elif Shafak
#17. I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages: to naively think that with their love they can change the man they love.
Elif Shafak
#18. Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain
Elif Shafak
#19. About the great preacher. I wanted to see him through foreign eyes, kind and unkind, loving and unloving, before I looked on him with my own.
Elif Shafak
#20. Religions are like rivers: they all flow to the same sea.
Elif Shafak
#21. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.
Elif Shafak
#22. Sanity was a promised land, the Shangri-la she had been deported from as a teenager, and to which she intended to return to one day.
Elif Shafak
#23. In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds.
Elif Shafak
#24. Perhaps this is why lunatics have a harder time dating, not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find soemone who is willing to date so many people in one person.
Elif Shafak
#25. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
Elif Shafak
#26. It's odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.
Elif Shafak
#27. When women survive an awful marriage or love affair, and all that shit, they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however, it is just the opposite; the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.
Elif Shafak
#29. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within.
Elif Shafak
#30. If only humans could live exposed to the skies, open and unafraid, watching the stars and being watched by them, with nothing to hide.
Elif Shafak
#31. May love always be with you, and you always surrounded by love
Elif Shafak
#32. No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere.
Elif Shafak
#34. But now she wasn't sure if she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century.
Elif Shafak
#35. Whatever you do, she would have said, don't hurt anyone and don't let anyone hurt you. Be neither a heartbreaker nor heartbroken.
Elif Shafak
#36. There were different ways of growing old, perhaps. Some withered first in body, others in mind, yet others in soul.
Elif Shafak
#37. Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That's the hardest part and that's what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.
Elif Shafak
#38. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman could love without losing her self-respect.
Elif Shafak
#39. How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.
Elif Shafak
#40. She left her breast behind, the breast that covered her heart. And walked away.
Elif Shafak
#41. Once there was, once there wasn't, God's creature were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin.
Elif Shafak
#42. God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together. If only she could solve this mystery, she could bring meaning to senselessness, reason to madness, order to chaos, and perhaps, too, she could learn to be happy.
Elif Shafak
#43. When you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart.
Elif Shafak
#44. Life often felt unjust, but death was the biggest injustice.
Elif Shafak
#45. Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come
Elif Shafak
#46. Mourning is like virginity. You should give it to the one who deserves it most.
Elif Shafak
#48. There were many words piled up inside my chest, stories waiting to be told. I wanted to hand all this knowledge to one other person, neither a master nor a disciple. I sought an equal - a companion.
Elif Shafak
#49. Tragedy was a commodity like any other. it was meant to be consumed- individually and collectively.
Elif Shafak
#50. When I met you, Peri, I thought this girl doesn't know it but she carries the three passion of Bertrand Russel: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable compassion for the suffering of mankind.
Elif Shafak
#51. May love find you when you least expect, where you least expect.
Elif Shafak
#52. Irrationality is part of everyday rationale
Elif Shafak
#53. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.
Elif Shafak
#55. I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.
Elif Shafak
#56. From her he had learned two fundamental things about love: first, that unlike what the romantics so pompously argued, love was more a gradual course than a sudden blossoming at first sight, and second, that he was capable of loving.
Elif Shafak
#57. Every book is a journey, a map into the complexities of the human mind and soul.
Elif Shafak
#59. If you couldn't help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as if you had been de-generized and now had only enough strength to be average.
Elif Shafak
#60. The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.
Elif Shafak
#61. That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.
Elif Shafak
#62. I thank Him for all the things He has both given and denied me, for only He knows what is best for me.
Elif Shafak
#63. The past in an interpretation. The future is an illusion.
Elif Shafak
#64. The sharia is like a candle," said Shams of Tabriz. "It provides us with much valuable light. But let us not forget that a candle helps us to go from one place to another in the dark. If we forget where we are headed and instead concentrate on the candle, what good is it?
Elif Shafak
#65. Male writers are thought of as "writers" first and then "men". As for female writers, they are first "feamle" and only then "writers".
Elif Shafak
#66. And were you able to find Him?" I inquired.
A shadow crossed his face as the dervish noded and said.
"Indeed, He was with me all along.
Elif Shafak
#67. You see, God's love is an endless ocean, and human beings strive to get as much water as they can out of it. But at the end of the day, how much water we each get depends on the size of our cups. Some people have barrels, some buckets, while some others have only got bowls.
Elif Shafak
#68. The impression she left on others and her self-perception had been sewn into a whole so consummate that she could no longer tell how much of each day was defined by what was wished upon her and how much of it was what she really wanted.
--Three Daughters of Eve.
Elif Shafak
#69. Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
Elif Shafak
#71. For apprentices everywhere - no one told us that love was the hardest craft to master
Elif Shafak
#72. People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead.
-Three Daughters of Eve
Elif Shafak
#73. No wonder the Prophet Muhammad said, "In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants.
Elif Shafak
#74. Even a speck of love should not go unappreciated, because, as Rumi said, love is the water of life.
Elif Shafak
#75. Faith is only a word if there is no love at its center, so flaccid and lifeless, vague and hollow - not anything you could truly feel.
Elif Shafak
#76. While the parts change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing ever really changes.
Elif Shafak
#77. The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without
Elif Shafak
#78. It was always like this. When you spoke the truth, they hated you. The more you talked about love, the more they hated you.
Elif Shafak
#79. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to life, old ones need to wither away.
Elif Shafak
#80. Does what we do in life matter so much? Or is it what we don't do that carries weight?
Elif Shafak
#81. Intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected
Elif Shafak
#82. Invisible strands of solidarity threaded among strangers who, upon finding out they shared the same religion or nationality, developed an instant affinity.
Elif Shafak
#83. By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans
Elif Shafak
#84. ... do not ask yourself which kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western..Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, definitions'.
Elif Shafak
#85. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#86. Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.
Elif Shafak
#87. I don't think I'll ever become a real writer and that's quite all right now. I've reached an age at which I'm more at peace with my limitations and failures.
Elif Shafak
#88. Whenever you got angry with someone, you should replace the face of that person in your mind with the face of someone you love ... perhaps you could find something to like in him.
Elif Shafak
#89. What is the point of roaming the world when it's the same misery everywhere?
Elif Shafak
#90. Instead of an outer-oriented jihad - defined as "the war against infidels" and carried out by many in those days just as in the present - Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one's ego, nafs.
Elif Shafak
#91. There was something in the color white that resembled silence. Both were emptied of life.
Elif Shafak
#92. They didn't hear her , but it was enough that GOD did
Elif Shafak
#93. It is not up to us to judge and measure each other's devoutness.
Elif Shafak
#94. Little did she know that this was going to be not just any book, but the book that changed her life. In the time she was reading it, her life would be rewritten.
Elif Shafak
#95. Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one's faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.
Elif Shafak
#97. Naked female bodies with their legs apart, a granny and her sagging tits. Terrified,
Elif Shafak
#98. Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird.
Elif Shafak
#99. The creature who arrived at your door, having bitten the hand that fed him all along, would not hesitate to sink his teeth into your flesh once he was inside.
Elif Shafak
#100. If you don't know what to do with an answer, don't ask the question.
Elif Shafak
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
