Top 100 Naguib Mahfouz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

52. “I defend both the freedom of expression and society’s right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

53. “As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

54. “I reject any path which rejects life, but I can’t help loving Sufism because it sounds so beautiful. It gives relief in the midst of battle.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

55. “Run after truth until you’re breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, a hard one interspersed with drunken moments.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

56. “Excessive concern with religion seems to me a last resort for people who have been exhausted by life.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

57. “I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

58. “For the first time in my life, I felt that a wave, a justice was sweeping away a deep-seated decay without any indulgence. I dearly wished that it would keep going without hesitation or deviation, in a spirit of purity forever.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

59. “My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don’t forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

60. “I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

61. “I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it’s because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

62. “It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

63. “I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

64. “The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

65. “Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

66. “My wife thought I deserved it, but I always thought the Nobel a Western prize.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

67. “I didn’t make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

68. “Insults are the business of the court.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

69. “I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

70. “I consider Khomeini’s position dangerous. He does not have the right to pass judgment-that is not the Islamic way.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

71. “I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

72. “I’ve never worked in politics, never been a member of an official committee or a political party.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

73. “I am practically in the employ of Mr. Nobel. I have to meet everyone he sends my way.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

74. “I believe in life and in people. I feel obliged to advocate their highest ideals as long as I believe them to be true. I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from rebellion would be a form of treason.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

75. “Don’t go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

76. “Patience in the face of the bitterness of misfortune is the door to the sweetness of intimate discourse.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

77. “Laugh till you’re exhausted.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

78. “How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

79. “A crazy country, choking air, polluted hearts, treachery. Treachery and treason.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

80. “Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

81. “When we’re in love, we may resent it, but we certainly miss love once it’s gone.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

82. “April. Month of dust and lies.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

83. “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.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

84. “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.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

85. “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.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

86. “After living for a month in his home, her character had been infected with the virus of submission to his will, which terrified everyone in the house.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

87. “An anxious heart is like a string that’s out of tune.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

88. “Every inch a person’s body travels on the road of separation seems like miles to the heart.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

89. “I want a world where men live free from fear and coercion.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

90. “No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

91. “He was not accustomed to busying himself with introspection or self-analysis. In this way he was like most people who are rarely alone. His mind did not swing into action until some external force required it: a man or woman or some other element of his material life. He had surrendered himself to the busy current of his life, submerging himself totally in it. All he saw of himself was his reflection on the surface of the stream.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

92. “Take your fill, for you will not see again that which you are leaving. Every moment is the last.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

93. “Despite dissimilarities in our luck and success at looking after ourselves, we are all human beings.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

94. “Thought is a double-edged blessing.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

95. “The sages have said that a person does not merit the divine term ‘human’ until he is able to govern his lusts and his passions.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

96. “All people seek refuge in the shade of the leafy tree, but when winter strips it bare they forsake it without regret.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

97. “A person who has forgotten his sorrows can be forced to confront them once more when someone with the best intentions favors him with a word of comfort.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

98. “There is no ‘truth and fiction’, but different kinds of truths that vary depending on the phases of life and the quality of the system that helps us become aware of them. Legends are truths like the truths of nature, mathematics and history. Each one has its spiritual system.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

99. “When we emigrate to the moon, we will be the first settlers ever to run from Nothingness to Nothingness.”

— Naguib Mahfouz

100. “A bit of superstition relieves the mind of the weight of facts and rigorous science.”

— Naguib Mahfouz