Selected Quotations

"Is it not a mystery that, among all beings, we are the world's most unrealised possibility? We are the beings most deeply in the act of becoming among all that exists."

"For me, not only thinking but writing, as the material embodiment of thought, is itself a psychoanalytic process."

"I believe there is a profound difference between being alone and standing as a singular person. In the first, the invisible chains of others still bind us; in the second, we stand among everyone, unchained."

"For me, philosophy is love for a world that can come into being but has not yet been realised."

"Across the vastness of galaxies and the boundlessness of time, our being here, in this moment, is stranger than all our non-being in the past and future."

"A difficult truth of life is that we often have to shed many tears over the suffering of the soul before those same tears wash our eyes clear enough to see the path of our life and our own truth."

"Do you still know a sacred corner to which you can return? Is there something, someone, an idea you love enough for it to become sacred? Is there still a place in your world for the enchantment of stories and immersion in unknown beauty? Have you left any place in your world for yourself?"

"We, the people of Iran, do not wait for the victorious dawn before celebrating light's triumph over darkness. We hold our festival while darkness still seems absolute, and go out to meet the light we believe will follow this overwhelming night."

"We are only travellers through the realm of ideas, not rulers of its lands."

"Perhaps the first principle of wisdom is to exempt nothing from questioning—especially what we are most certain is right and true."

"What is a homeland, if not our shared narrative of the land on which we live?"

"Between birth and death, being human, for me, means learning how to love and how to lose at the same time."

"My true self is that continuity at the centre of my being which learns, steps into the unknown, gains, fails, rises after every fall, and is reborn after every death."

"The purpose of philosophy, in my view, is to change the human being and the world—not to define one word with another."

"Do not sell your individuality to any cult of personality; it is a wholly losing bargain, and its price is the loss of your own self."

"Narratives matter; they shape people, give direction to history, and rewrite the future."