“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― The Cocktail Party

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
― Four Quartets

Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian writer)
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Born : December 11, 1911
Died : August 30, 2006
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Egyptian novelist and screenplay writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arabic writer to be so honoured.

In subsequent works, Mahfouz offered critical views of the old Egyptian monarchy, British colonialism, and contemporary Egypt. Several of his more notable novels deal with social issues involving women and political prisoners. His novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959; Children of the Alley) was banned in Egypt for a time because of its controversial treatment of religion and its use of characters based on Muhammad, Moses, and other figures. Islamic militants, partly because of their outrage over the work, later called for his death, and in 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck.