Naguib Mahfouz Quotes

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.

There is no alternative to action, and that requires faith. The issue is how we are to mold for ourselves a belief system that is worthy of life.

It is an indication of truth's jealousy that it has not made for anyone a path to it, and that it has not deprived anyone of the hope of attaining it, and it has left people running in the deserts of perplexity and drowning in the seas of doubt; and he who thinks he has attained it, it dissociates itself from, and he who thinks he has dissociated himself from it has lost his way.

An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune.

I want a world where hearts are not deceived and do not deceive others.

Why don’t we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?

Don't go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.

At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.