Top 100 Naguib Mahfouz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

Featured in: Deep Quotes, Fear Quotes

2. “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

Featured in: Quotes About Home

3. “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

Featured in: Wise Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

4. “Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

5. “It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

6. “If life has no meaning, why don’t we create a meaning for it?”

— Naguib Mahfouz

7. “Without literature my life would be miserable.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

8. “Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, art would be meaningless and cease to exist.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

9. “Madness is the acme of intelligence.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

10. “You know what I’m afraid of? That God is sick of us.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

11. “I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

12. “It’s clearly more important to treat one’s fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one’s head to a prayer mat.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

13. “I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday, and in the afternoon, I eat.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

14. “The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

15. “Only the poor are handicapped by honor.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

16. “Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

17. “Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

18. “If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

19. “God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

20. “The real malady is fear of life, not of death.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

21. “In the calculus of good deeds you have the most to gain.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

22. “I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

23. “The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

24. “He seemed to be waiting for a miracle to save him from the depths his life had reached and take him to a land of dreams.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

25. “Happy is he who can give himself up.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

26. “We wont develop until we accept that reading is a vital necessity.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

27. “The heart is a place of secrets...”

— Naguib Mahfouz

28. “Visit me once each year, for it’s wrong to abandon people forever.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

29. “I was afraid of marriage. I had the impression married life would take up all my time. I saw myself drowning in visits and parties. No freedom.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

30. “At my age it is unseemly to be pessimistic.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

31. “I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

32. “In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

33. “An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

34. “Events at home, at work, in the street – these are the bases for a story.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

35. “There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

36. “History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

37. “We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

38. “It’s not surprising that truly humanitarian manifestos originate frequently in minority circles or with people whose consciences are troubled by the problems of minorities.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

39. “The criminal is trying to solve his immediate problems.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

40. “Today’s interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

41. “One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

42. “If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

43. “A priest’s life is spent between question and answer – or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

44. “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.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

45. “According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

46. “As for life’s tragedies, our love will defeat them. Love is the most effective cure. In the crevices of disasters, happiness lies like a diamond in a mind, so let us instill in ourselves the wisdom of love.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

47. “If we reject science, we reject the common man.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

48. “We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

49. “We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don’t forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

50. “The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.”

— Naguib Mahfouz