Top 40 Yasmina Khadra Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The man who let the love of his life pass him by will end up alone with his regrets and all the sighs in the world won’t soothe his soul.”

— Yasmina Khadra

2. “Get a grip on yourself. there’s only one god here on earth, and that’s you. If you don’t like the world, make one you like better.”

— Yasmina Khadra

3. “Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes.”

— Yasmina Khadra

4. “Music is the true breath of life. We eat so we won’t starve to death. We sing so we can hear ourselves live.”

— Yasmina Khadra

5. “For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is reckless and folly. Certainly a woman is not everthing, but everything depends on her.”

— Yasmina Khadra

6. “We’re fine together, just like this: Our silence protects us from ourselves.”

— Yasmina Khadra

7. “There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn’t more important than other people’s lives.”

— Yasmina Khadra

8. “Though there are things beyond our understanding, for the most part we are the architects of our own unhappiness.”

— Yasmina Khadra

9. “The can take everything you own- your property, your best years, all your joys, all your good works, everything down to your last shirt- but you’ll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world.”

— Yasmina Khadra

10. “It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.”

— Yasmina Khadra

11. “I had a little light. I blew on it, trying to turn it into a torch, but I blew a bit too hard and put it out.”

— Yasmina Khadra

12. “Somewhere it is written that I was born to leave my home, to constantly leave, each time leaving a part of me behind.”

— Yasmina Khadra

13. “We’ve already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we’ve forgotten it.”

— Yasmina Khadra

14. “Celui qui t’a dit qu’un homme ne doit pas pleurer ignore ce qu’homme veut dire.”

— Yasmina Khadra

15. “Of course, I’m aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred...”

— Yasmina Khadra

16. “If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much.”

— Yasmina Khadra

17. “If a woman loves you, Younes, if she truly loves you, and if you have the wisdom to appreciate this great privilege, then there is no god to touch you.”

— Yasmina Khadra

18. “Le courage, monsieur Krausmann, le courage tout court, c’est de croire en soi.”

— Yasmina Khadra

19. “If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love... Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous... for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.”

— Yasmina Khadra

20. “Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I’ve known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That’s all I’ve seen for my whole life.”

— Yasmina Khadra

21. “I was depressed. I knew I was lost, but I had no idea how to find myself again. It was as though I was a different person, an infuriating, disappointing yet indispensable person whose body was my only home.”

— Yasmina Khadra

22. “What’s a house when you’ve lost a country?′ she says with a sigh.”

— Yasmina Khadra

23. “I looked her up and down. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I didn’t recognize her anymore. She was nothing like the image of her I had in my head. Her features meant nothing to me; she was someone else.”

— Yasmina Khadra

24. “Who dreams so much, forgets to live.”

— Yasmina Khadra

25. “The stations of life are not places to inhabit. Rather, they are moments of opportunity that will not repeat themselves.”

— Yasmina Khadra

26. “The three of us, each paralyzed in his own silence, contemplate the horizon, which the dawn lights up with a thousand fires; and each of us knows for certain that the rising sun of this day, like all those that have gone before it, will be incapable of bringing sufficient light into the hearts of men.”

— Yasmina Khadra

27. “Anyone who tells you that a greater symphony exists than the breath in your body is lying.”

— Yasmina Khadra

28. “I stayed at the port until the dawn broke, leaning over the railing, unable to reconcile myself to the idea that something that had never really begun was truly over.”

— Yasmina Khadra

29. “There’s no more painful love than the love you feel when you’re in a railroad station and you exchange glances with someone whose train is headed in the other direction.”

— Yasmina Khadra

30. “The Jew is born as free as the wind, as indomitable as the Judean desert. Why did he mark the boundaries of his homeland so carelessly that it was nearly taken from him? Because for a long time he believed that the Promised Land is, first and foremost, the land where there’s no wall to keep him from seeing farther than his cries can carry.”

— Yasmina Khadra

31. “A brute is still a brute, even when smiles; the eyes are where the soul declares its true nature.”

— Yasmina Khadra

32. “And yet we were very much alike; we’d lost our souls, and we were ready to destroy others.”

— Yasmina Khadra

33. “Was I happy after that? I think so. I experienced moments of pleasure, moments of unforgettable joy; I loved again and dreamed again like a wide-eyed boy. And yet I always felt there was something missing, something that left me somehow crippled, in short that I only every hovered on the fringes of happiness.”

— Yasmina Khadra

34. “When you can’t find a remedy for your pain, you look for someone to blame.”

— Yasmina Khadra

35. “This land does not belong to you. It belongs to that ancient shepherd whose ghost is standing next to you, though you refuse to see it. Since you do not know how to share, take your vineyards and your bridges, your paved roads and your railway tracks, your cities and your gardens and give back what remains to its rightful owners”.”

— Yasmina Khadra

36. “Life has rules, Omar, and without some of them, humanity would return to the Stone Age.”

— Yasmina Khadra

37. “You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?”

— Yasmina Khadra

38. “Amin, you’re not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don’t believe in the salvation of others?”

— Yasmina Khadra

39. “But how can I accept blindness in order to be happy? How can a man turn his back on himself without coming face-to-face with his own negation? You can’t water a flower with one hand and pluck it with the other. When you put a rose in a vase, you don’t restore its charm; you denature it. You think you’re beautifying your room, but in fact, all you’re doing is disfiguring your garden.”

— Yasmina Khadra

40. “The world is a silence broken by the barking of a stray dog.”

— Yasmina Khadra

41. “In Jerusalem, people are very cautious in the morning, out of superstition: The first words and deeds at dawn, it’s said, usually shape the rest of the day.”

— Yasmina Khadra

42. “Her eyes were springs from which ecstasy drew water.”

— Yasmina Khadra