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“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something �� a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things �� which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.”
― Steve Maraboli

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

“اتباع التقاليد لا يعني أن الأموات أحياء، بل أن الأحياء أموات.”
― ابن خلدون

“الفتن التي تتخفى وراء قناع الدين تجارة رائجة جدًا في عصور التراجع الفكري للمجتمعات”
― ابن خلدون

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

“The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.”
― Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

“Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?”
― Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

“He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.”
― Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

“The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“The thirst for vengeance did not wait for Islam to appear in the world, and the appeal to the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is universal. ”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“When an angry mob demands the death of a female English schoolteacher alleged to have insulted the Prophet, as happened in Sudan in November 2007, the real objective was not the defence of Islam but of honour, which �� it was felt �� had been slighted for many long years by the Western powers. This ‘spontaneous�� use of religion was accompanied by its deliberate instrumentalization by those who are pursuing other objectives, but who prefer this disguise. Even the Crusades, as I have said, had several motives other than religious ones, but these motives were merely less easy to admit to; so they preferred to declare that Jerusalem needed to be liberated. Such a cause appears nobler; and, in addition, the appeal to cultural identity allows more powerful inner resources to be mobilized.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“Every human being needs a set of norms and rules, traditions and customs, transmitted from the older to the younger; without those norms, the individual would never achieve the fullness of his humanity, but would be reduced to the condition of the 'Wild Child", condemned to anomie, in other words to the absence of all law and all order- an absence that can create severe disturbances.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“Torture is not to be condemned merely because it does not produce the effects expected; it is to be condemned, first and foremost, because it is an unacceptable attack on the very idea of humanity. It is the surest index of barbarism �� that extreme pole in human behaviour that leads us to ride roughshod over the humanity of the other. Yet again, torture is in this respect worse than murder, since by torturing I do not remain content with eliminating the person to whom I object, I draw satisfaction from his suffering, from excluding him from humanity, and this intense pleasure lasts for as long as he is alive. Torture leaves an indelible mark on the person tortured but also on the torturer. Institutional torture is even worse than individual torture, since it subverts every idea of justice and right. If the state itself becomes a torturer, how can we believe in the order that it claims to bring or to endorse?”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“ليست الهويات المعادية هي التي تسبب الصراعات, بل الصراعات هي التي تجعل الهويات معادية”
― Tzvetan Todorov, تأملات في الحضارة والديمقراطية والغيرية

“When we examine , not the language of propaganda, but the witness of the combatants themselves, religion does not occupy the first place. Their motivations are more often secular, they mention their sympathy for a population reduced to poverty, the victims of the whim of ruling classes that live in luxury and corruption- rulers able to maintain themselves in power thanks only to the support of the American government ( as in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt). They speak of the members of their families or their local communities who have suffered or died by the fault of these governments ( and thus of their protectors); and they want to avenge them. The thirst for vengeance did not wait for Islam to appear in the world, and the appeal to the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is universal.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“Unlimited freedom kills freedom.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“Wars are motivated by the need to seize the wealth of our neighbours, to wield power, to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats: in short they have, as we have seen, political, social, economic or demographic causes. There is no need to refer to Islam or the clash of civilizations to explain why the Afghans or the Iraqis resist the western military forces occupying their countries. Nor to speak of anti-Jewish sentiment or anti-Semitism to understand the reasons why the Palestinians are not overjoyed by the Israeli occupation of their lands.”
― Tzvetan Todorov

“فالعاشق لا يعرف اليأس أبدا .. وللقلب المغرم كل الأشياء ممكنة .”
― جلال الدين الرومي

“بدأت أتعب من المخلوقات، أريدُ جمال الخالق.
لكن حين أتطلع هناك، أرى نفسي.
وحين أتطلع إلى نفسي، أرى ذلك الجمال.”
― جلال الدين الرومي

“مَنْ لا يركض
إلى فتنة العشق
يمشي طريقا
لا شيء فيه حي.”
― جلال الدين الرومي

“There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.”
― Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

“We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“يا موطناً في ثراه غاب سادته* لوكان يخجل من باعوك ما باعوا”
― إبراهيم طوقان, الأعمال الشعرية الكاملة: إبراهيم طوقان

“وعين الرضا عن كل عيب كليلة
ولكن عين السخط تبدي المساويا
ولست بهياب لمـن لا يهابنـي
ولست أرى للمرء ما لا يرى ليا
فإن تدن مني تدن منك مودتـي
وإن تنأ عني تلقني عنـك نائيـاً
كلانا غني عـن أخيـه حياتـه
ونحـن إذا متنـا أشـد تغانيـا”
― الشافعي

“Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin