Malek > Malek's Quotes

“All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given.”
― Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life

“Pour celui qui a traversé la vallée des ténèbres, l'étincelle est feu d'artifices, le gazouillis est symphonie, le nuage tapis volant et chaque nouveau jour un miracle.”
― Yasmina Khadra, Les Vertueux

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Des choses incroyables vous tombent dessus, détournent le cours de votre existence et le bouleversent de fond en comble. Vous avez beau fuir au bout du monde, vous réfugier là où personne ne risque de vous trouver, elles vous suivent à la trace comme une meute de chiens errants et font de vous quelqu'un qui ne vous ressemble en rien et qui devient la seule histoire que l'on retiendra de vous.
Certains appellent ces choses "mektoub".”
― Yasmina Khadra, Les Vertueux

“While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Classical psychological theory tends to, by absolute omission, split the human psyche away from relationship to the land on which humans live, away from knowledge of the cultural etiologies of malaise and unrest, and also to sever psyche from the politics and policies which shape the inner and outer lives of humans-- as though that outer world were not just as surreal, not just as symbol-laden, not just as impacting and imposing upon one's soul-life as the inner din. The land, the culture, and the politics in which one lives contribute every bit as much to the individual's psychic landscape and are as valuable to consider in these lights as one's subjective milieu.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“If He were just a theory, just a doctrine, with no experience of Him woven into us, I doubt that faith in Him would ever last long. . Of course, it can't be proved that what happened to me was more than psychological...Once you believe God and He becomes real, the doubts of the intellect, while difficult and persistent and demanding answers, lose some of their power, because you have the sense that the part of you that doubts and mocks and postures as heroic for doing so is only the blind part, and that this part is not to be given as much credence as you gave it before you had an experience of God.

I was not convinced by rational argument of things I had not believed
before—instead, I saw them through another faculty entirely, and my reason has followed along in the wake of that experience, examining the evidence, sifting the facts, analyzing the possibilities of deception or contradiction … but always knowing itself to be in the presence of something greater than itself, something that it dare not try to mock or erase or entirely belittle. Reason has been eager to investigate whether my experience can be evaluated in an intellectual way and yet stand. But reason comes along behind, it cannot have the last word; it is mute even when it occasionally has the impulse to mock or to challenge, and speaks mostly when it has rational insight into the thing greater than itself (faith)—or into some aspect of it, since reason is unable to completely understand or explain … My inner life has become more real to me than my intellectual life, if I may distinguish them. Light simply explains itself—or doesn't explain, just shines.

Once I had seen this sort of light pouring down on everything, my interest in intellectual things was to probe this mystery from the intellectual angle—not so much to prove that it could be true (although that is always interesting!) as to support by reason, if it's possible, why it is true. I was willing to assent to things that could not be proven on an intellectual basis because the results of believing that they were true had a power that surpassed comprehension.”
― Solomon Schimmel, The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth

“Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.”
― bell hooks

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”
― Paul of Tarsus, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans

“With upraised arms I cry, but no one listens. From Dharma comes wealth, power, and the sensuous pleasure of life. Why don't people practice virtue?”
― Vyasa, Mahabharata

“You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

Perform every action with you heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.”
― Bhagavad Gita

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love--whether we call it friendship or family or romance--is the work of mirroring each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when shame and sorrow occlude our own light from view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“protection from a pendulum is to be found in emptiness. If I am empty there is nothing for the pendulum to hook onto. There is no point in playing a game with a pendulum or trying to protect yourself from it if it can simply be ignored. When you can ignore the pendulum its energy will pass by you, dissipating into space without causing you any harm. A pendulum cannot push your buttons or upset you if you are empty in relationship to it.”
― Vadim Zeland, Reality Transurfing Steps I-V

“The world is a mirror that reflects your relationship to it. When you are discontent with the world, it turns away from you. When you fight the world it fights you back. When you end the battle the world meets you halfway.”
― Vadim Zeland, Reality Transurfing Steps I-V