Egypt Quotes

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
― Shakespeare William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“. ثلاثون عاماً ظهر فيها الدش والمحمول والإنترنت واختفى الوطن..”
― جلال عامر

“أعيش بين حكومة تصدر القوانين التى تريدها وتنفذ الأحكام التى تعجبها، وأناس شديدى التدين قليلى التقوى يحرّمون سماع الأصوات ولا يجرّمون شراءها،”
― جلال عامر

“لقد جمع بلفور اليهود فى وطن واحد وعدهم به و بهذا أراح العالم منهم

اعتقادى ان هناك وعداً آخر .. ثمة شخص جمع الأوغاد و الخاملين و الأفاقين و فاقدى الهمة من أرجاء الأرض فى وطن قومى واحد هو مصر .. لهذا لا تجد فى اليابان فاقد همة .. لهذا لا تجد فىى ألمانيا وغداً .. لهذا لا تجد فى الأرجنتين أفاقاً .. كلهم هنا يا صاحبى!”
― Ahmed Khaled Towfik, يوتوبيا

“العبارة الأخيرة التى قالها فاروق لى: "ليس من السهل حكم مصر". ساعتها كنت اتصور أننا سنواجه كل ما نواجهه من صعوبات الحكم باللجوء للشعب, لكننى الان أدرك ان فاروق كان يعنى شيئا اخر.. لا أتصور أن احدا من اللذين حكموا مصر أدركوه, وهو ان الجماهير التى ترفع الحاكم الى سابع سماء هى التى تنزل به الى سابع أرض .. لكن.. لا أحد يتعلم الدرس.”
― محمد نجيب, كنت رئيسًا لمصر

“أنتِ تحبين مصر تماماً كما تحبين عرضاً طريفاً فى السيرك أو حيواناً نادراً فى حديقة الحيوان.لكن صدقينى.أن تولدى مصرية,فهذه مأساة!!”
― علاء الأسواني, نيران صديقة

“I see murky visions of other gods and rival magic."
That REALLY didn't sound good.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "what OTHER GODS?"
"I don't know, Sadie. But Egypt has always faced challenges from outside –– magicians from elsewhere, even gods from elsewhere. Just be vigilant."

~Ruby & Sadie Kane about...? Possibly Greeks?”
― Rick Riordan, The Serpent's Shadow

“Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.

Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.

All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.'

If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.

All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.”
― Robert G Ingersoll, About The Holy Bible

“And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

“Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked.
Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.”
― Rick Riordan

“القراءة في مصر ملهاة رخيصة ولن تتطور حتى تؤمن بأن القراءة ضرورة حيوية”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street

“When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.”
― Mohamed ElBaradei

“(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

“And Egypt ? What is Egypt strenght?her resilience ?her ability to absorb poeple and events into the pores of her being? is that true or is it just a consolation ? a shifting of responsibility? and if it is true , how much can she absorb and still remain Egypt ?”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“Conformity is deformity”
― Sharon Desruisseaux

“I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways”
― Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun

“But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?”
― Father Dioscuros

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”
― Johannes Kepler, Harmonies of the World

“He stopped. She heard the intake of his breath. “You are my country, Desdemona.” Yearning, harsh and poignant and she felt herself swaying toward him. “My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.”

She gasped.

His gaze fell, shielded by his lashes. An odd, half-mocking smile played about his lips. “You’ll never hear old Blake say something like that.”

She swallowed, unable to speak, her senses abraded by his stimulating words, her pulse hammering in anticipation? Trepidation?

“Remember my words next time he calls you a bloody English rose.”
― Connie Brockway, As You Desire

“[Dialogue between Solon and an Egyptian Priest]
In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais [...] To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.”
― Plato, Timaeus and Critias

“When the Franks and Turks weren't fighting over Egypt, the only thing they seemed to agree on was that the Egyptians couldn't govern it themselves. God forbid. It's not as though the Egyptians were the inheritors of a great civilization whose mighty monuments still littered the land. Oh, no. They were peasants, superstitious fools who ate too many beans”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass

“آه لو رأيت حقول قصب السكر العالي أو زهر الكتان في الوانه الأزرق والبنفسجي، لو رأيت الأطفال يجمعون القطن في جيوب صنعوها من جلابيبهم كجيوب الكنغر، لو رأيت اشجار الصفصاف العتيقة وشعورها مدلاة في القنوات الجارية، والرهبان عائدين إلى صوامعهم في الأديرة، ونداء المؤذن يرتفع عالياً في السماء الضاربة إلى الاحمرار ساعة المغرب، فهذه أرض يتجلى فيها الله بلا انقطاع”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“أعددت قائمة سوداء بكل من تعامل مع هذا النظام خلال 18 يوماً من أعظم أيام جيلنا، بل ومن أعظم أيام العصر الحديث، تعاملوا مع النظام القديم واساؤا إلينا وإلى ثورتنا وقاموا بإهانتنا (...) هذه القائمة التي رحت أعدها لحظة بلحظة طوال الأيام الثمانية عشر التي أشعلنا فيها ثورتنا.. قمت بحذفها منذ دقائق، لإيماني العميق بأن الساعي إلى الحرية لا يقوم بتنصيب محاكم التفتيش للآخرين ولا يسعى إلى تصفية حسابات مع البعض سواء يعرفهم بشكل شخصي أو تضرر منهم في الإطار العام، وأن وصم البعض بآرائهم هو فعل ينتمي إلى نظام حسني مبارك بامتياز ويجب ألا نسمح لأفعال هذا النظام بالتسرب مجدداً لتلوث روحنا التي تطهرت بوهج ثورتنا العظيمة.”
― Ihab Omar, الثورة المصرية الكبرى

“If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale".”
― Eamonn Gearon, The Sahara: A Cultural History

“في الأرض الواقعة بين الخوف والأمل تنبت زهرة وحيدة حمراء بلون الدم عطرها قوي ونبيل..ومن خلف غيوم الحيرة وسحب الغاز تلوح شمس جديدة ليوم مختلف..”
― mohamed gamal aboueid

“The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.”
― Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries

“قاطع انتخابات الرئاسة المصرية من أجل أن تنقذ احمد شفيق من الخسارة .. قاطع من اجل دعم وصوله لكرسى الرئاسة.. قاطع لتمحو كل آثار الثورة وتقضى عليها ‎‪”
― Ahmed Ismail

“And Pythagoras is reported to have been a disciple of Sonches the Egyptian arch-prophet; and Plato, of Sechnuphis of Heliopolis; and Eudoxus, of Cnidius of Konuphis, who was also an Egyptian.
[Stromata, 1.15]”
― Clement of Alexandria