Nawal El Saadawi Quotes

I don't hold any regrets whatsoever about my life besides hurting people I loved.

I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.

In my sobriety, I have discovered that the people I love, and who hurt me, were sick like me.

My faith was eventually what helped me face myself, tell the truth about everything I had done, face criticism, cope with guilt, pain, and grow from all of it.

The truth may hurt, but love helps ease the pain.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

Being hurt inevitably breeds feelings of hatred towards your attacker. But when we hurt others, we have to deal with their hatred for us, and our own feelings of guilt. But knowing what it feels like to be hurt is exactly why we try to be kind to others. That's what makes us human.

As an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden (Gethsemane) as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting someone to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and God's pain, and am devastated - because their pain becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the other.

It's an interesting thing to be in your forties and evaluate success and take ownership of some disasters and some pain and try to forgive a little bit - yourself and others.

It doesn't matter how greatly you've been hurt or how much you're hurting, it's what you do with the pain that counts. You could cry for years or you could choose to learn and grow from it.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

And if you think that you're showing your love to Catherine by suffering the way you've been doing, then somewhere along the way, I must have messed up in raising you." "You didn't mess up...." "I must have. Because when I look at you, I see myself, and to be honest, I'd rather see someone different. I'd like to see someone who learned that it's okay to go on, that it's okay to find someone that can make you happy. But right now, it's like I'm looking in the mirror and seeing myself twenty years ago.

Women shouldn't be burdened by what existed in their past, we should all learn how to turn pain into strength.

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

Truth can hurt so very much.

Let go of the things you don't love about your childhood, and keep the things you love. Let go of the things you don't love about your adolescent and adult years, and keep the good things. Just keep the things you love about your whole life.

Life does not hurt nearly as much if we have learned to listen to ourselves and to recognize how fully and richly we are trying to tell ourselves the truth.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.

The only person I ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you're still functioning, you're the luckiest person in the world.

I firmly believe that usually, the person who hurt you doesn't realize what they've done or how much it hurt you. So, continue to pray for the person or situation that caused your pain and anger. Ask God to give you understanding about why they did what they did.

I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I'd ever known.

Sometimes when we're feeling sad, it's important just to feel the sadness. Like a snake shedding its skin, old feelings of remorse and regret and hurt and anger often have to come up in order to be released. On the other side we're a better person, capable of a happier life...who we are when we're no longer burdened by the buried feelings that weighed us down, or the self - defeating patterns that the pain produced.