وتمُر الأيام على مهلٍ ، على مللٍ ، على أمل.

الحِلمُ عَشِيرَة

— علي بن أبي طالب (ع)

When one's heart is weighed down with sorrows, even a smile becomes a triumphant act of courage.

الزُهدُ كُلّه بَينَ كَلِمَتَينِ مِنَ القرآن: «لِّكَيْلَا تَأْسَوْا عَلَىٰ مَا فَاتَكُمْ وَلَا تَفْرَحُوا بِمَا آتَاكُمْ» ومَنْ لَم يَأْسَ على المَاضي ولَم يَفرَح بالآتي، فَقَد أَخَذَ الزُّهدَ بِطَرَفَيه.

- علي بن أبي طالب (ع)

German: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum
Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der
Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

English: Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

.

وأكرِمْ عَشيرَتَكَ فإنّهُم جَنَاحُكَ الذي بِهِ تَطير، وأصلُكَ الذي إلَيه تَصير، ويَدُكَ التي بِها تَصول.

- علي بن أبي طالب (ع)

People are becoming way more fragile and irresponsible; they are regressing into children.

Whereas most traditional healing systems have sought to understand the relations of the sick person to the wider cosmos and to make readjustments between individual and world, or society and world, the western medical tradition explains sickness principally in terms of the body itself—its own cosmos. Greek medicine dismissed supernatural powers, though not macrocosmic, environmental influences; and from the Renaissance the flourishing anatomical and physiological programmes created a new confidence among investigators that everything that needed to be known could essentially be discovered by probing more deeply and ever more minutely into the flesh, its systems, tissues, cells, its DNA.

- The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, by Roy Porter

Check this, it was written in 1963:

I recently offered to a certain newspaper editor an article on an Arab country, in which I began by lightly sketching its history in two or three paragraphs, and then described its situation today. The editor sent the draft back, with a note to the effect that he would publish it if I could cut out the historical paragraphs. "People today," he concluded, "are not interested in history. All they want to know is your opinion on the political situation today." Judging by the many tragic errors we have made in the Middle East in recent years, this viewpoint must be widely held, both by our government and by the public.

It is curious that this should be so, in an age which talks so much about psychology and spends so much money on psychiatrists. In this field, the experts are constantly emphasizing, not only the importance of the peculiarities of our ancestors and parents, which we may have inherited, but also of the conditions under which we grew up through infancy and childhood. The circumstances of our early years, we are told, affect our mentality for the rest of our lives. If this be really so, it is surprising that we refuse to apply the same considerations to nations, and that we reject a study of their history, when we endeavour to ascertain why they behave as they do today.

Or, as the Arabs used to call him: أبو حنيك, because of a previous injury which shattered his jaw.

- Behind Her Eyes

I guess what's worse than losing friends, is realizing they've never been your friends anyways.

But then, that's also the silver lining