Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It was an ordinary spring day in Istanbul, a long and leaden afternoon like so many others, when she discovered, with a hollowness in her stomach, that she was capable of killing someone.”

— Elif Shafak

102. “There’s something about love that resembles faith. It’s kind of a blind trust, isn’t it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love- or by faith- it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of gods that we ourselves created.”

— Elif Shafak

103. “For apprentices everywhere – no one told us that love was the hardest craft to master.”

— Elif Shafak

104. “The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other... We strive for the opposite: to multiple everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere.”

— Elif Shafak

105. “People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy we make it stronger. Like a boomerang. You hurl it away, it comes back and hits you with equal force.”

— Elif Shafak

106. “I’m perpetually in a limbo. Maybe I want too many things at once and nothing passionately enough.”

— Elif Shafak

107. “Sometimes, for the soul to thrive, the heart needs to be broken, son.”

— Elif Shafak

108. “Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.”

— Elif Shafak

109. “They say there is a thin line between losing yourself in God and losing your mind.”

— Elif Shafak

110. “Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.”

— Elif Shafak

111. “The water that scares you rejuvenates me. For me I can swim, and swim I shall.”

— Elif Shafak

112. “Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.”

— Elif Shafak

113. “I didn’t make falafel. It’s not even our cuisine.”

— Elif Shafak

114. “Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.”

— Elif Shafak

115. “If you have no interest in their answers, then do not ask questions.”

— Elif Shafak

116. “Mourning is like virginity. You should give it to the one who deserves it most.”

— Elif Shafak

117. “On the Sufi path, first you discover the art of being alone amid the crowd. Next you discover the crowd within your solitude – the voices inside you.”

— Elif Shafak

118. “Kader ’, people called it – ‘destiny’ – and said no more, because people always gave simple names to the complex things that frightened them.”

— Elif Shafak

119. “Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don’t embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don’t put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don’t lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood. You don’t fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them.”

— Elif Shafak

120. “Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird. Break the cage, let the bird take off and soar high. Architecture is a mirror that reflects the harmony and balance present in the universe. If you do not foster these qualities in your heart, you cannot build.”

— Elif Shafak

121. “Because love is the very essence and purpose of life. As Rumi reminds us, it hits everybody, including those who shun love – even those who use the word “romantic” as a sign of disapproval.”

— Elif Shafak

122. “Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.”

— Elif Shafak

123. “Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between.”

— Elif Shafak

124. “Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing “submission” with “weakness,” whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.”

— Elif Shafak

125. “When you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart.”

— Elif Shafak

126. “The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in,” said Shams as if he had read my thoughts. “Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.”

— Elif Shafak

127. “Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?”

— Elif Shafak

128. “Masters are great but books are better. He who has a library has a thousand teachers. Your Prophet said, “Seek lore, even if it be in China.” Mine said, “God created us because He wanted to be known.” Ignorant men think we are here to fight and make wars and to couple and have children. Nay, our job is to expand our knowledge.”

— Elif Shafak

129. “In many ways the twenty-first century is not that different from the thirteenth century. Both will be recorded in history as times of unprecedented religious clashes, cultural misunderstandings, and a general sense of insecurity and fear of the Other. At times like these, the need for love is greater than ever.”

— Elif Shafak

130. “Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind.”

— Elif Shafak

131. “Busbecq believed there were two blessings in life: books and friends. And that they should be possessed in inverse quantities: many books, but only a handful of friends.”

— Elif Shafak

132. “Love can only be perfected in pain.”

— Elif Shafak

133. “Certainty was to curiosity what the sun was to the wings of Icarus. Where one shone forcefully, the other couldn’t survive. With certainty came arrogance; with arrogance, blindness; with blindness, darkness; and with darkness, more certainty.”

— Elif Shafak

134. “Choice and confusion were conjoined twins.”

— Elif Shafak

135. “In resistance lies the key to life.”

— Elif Shafak

136. “At night, flooded with light, Istanbul shone brighter than the eyes of a young bride.”

— Elif Shafak

137. “Where do you start someone’s story when life has more then one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end.”

— Elif Shafak

138. “People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.”

— Elif Shafak

139. “No one can survive alone – except the Almighty God. And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.”

— Elif Shafak

140. “I cannot prevent people from destroying. All I can do is keep building.”

— Elif Shafak

141. “You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.”

— Elif Shafak

142. “Listen, canim, I know you might get cross with me for saying this, but remember, good advice is always annoying and bad advice never is. So if what I say irritates you, take it as good advice.”

— Elif Shafak

143. “What we need is sincere self-examination. Not being on the watch for the fault of others.”

— Elif Shafak

144. “I’d rather extinguish the fire in hell and burn heaven, so that people could start loving God for no other reason than love.”

— Elif Shafak

145. “It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God. I.”

— Elif Shafak

146. “We’re all what we are. And we’re all subject to change. It is a journey from here to there.”

— Elif Shafak

147. “Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.”

— Elif Shafak

148. “His honesty offended others, but he liked to provoke people to see what came out of them in moments of anger.”

— Elif Shafak

149. “It’s odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.”

— Elif Shafak

150. “Stones stay still. A learner, never.”

— Elif Shafak