Naguib Mahfouz Quotes

Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.

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.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

Madness is the acme of intelligence.

If life has no meaning, why don't we create a meaning for it?

We wont develop until we accept that reading is a vital necessity.

Only the poor are handicapped by honor.

Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.

Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought.

The heart is a place of secrets.

You know what I'm afraid of? That God is sick of us.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

I believe in life and in people. I feel obliged to advocate their highest ideals as long as I believe them to be true. I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from rebellion would be a form of treason

Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.

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.

Excessive concern with religion seems to me a last resort for people who have been exhausted by life.

Happy is he who can give himself up.

Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, art would be meaningless and cease to exist.

The real malady is fear of life, not of death

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.

God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.

The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.