Persian Quotes

Woman is the light of God.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night,Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,and strikesThe Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light

~ Omar Khayyám

Beauty is dad kissing mom's hand when it cramps.Beauty is seeing a Persian woman dance.Ugly is not the absence of beauty.Uglyis the inability to identify it.The inability to be surprised by it.It is the persistent reluctance to be made a child by it.Beauty is simplythe manifestation oflove.

~ Kamand Kojouri

But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again,James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive - or not - without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times....At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling onto.

~ William Dalrymple

Even women deeply committed to the emancipatory promises of modernity were alarmed by the inappropriateness of unrelated men and omen socializing in the streets. In the women's press, articles exhorted young men to treat women respectfully in public. Other articles encouraged women to act as their own police and to be more observant of their hijab and public modesty.From the beginning, then, women's entry on the streets was subject to the regulatory harassment of men. The modernist heterosocializing promise that invited women to leave their homosocial spaces and become educated companionate partners for modernist men was underwritten by policing of women's public presence through men's street actions. Men at once desired heterosociality of the modern and yet would not surrender the privileged masculinity of the streets. Women's public presence was also underwritten by disciplinary approbation of modernizing women themselves whose emancipatory drive would be jeopardized by unruly public conduct.

~ Afsaneh Najmabadi

Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency.

~ Michael Benzehabe

Interpreting dreams for Iranians was just as much a sacrament as reading coffee cups was for Turks

~ Soroosh Shahrivar

The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.

~ Joseph Mccabe

There is a Persian proverb: 'To test that which has been tested is ignorance.' To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse.

~ Idries Shah

With wine beside a gently flowing brook - this is the best,Withdrawn from sorrow in some quiet nook - this is the best

~ Hafez

Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. . . . It is openly seductive but not surrendering.

~ Azar Nafisi