Chitra Ganesh, The Condition of Womanhood (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press.
Angels and Demons: Aphorisms
It’s a sign of spiritual maturity when lesser transgressions prick our conscience more than before.
Inhibitions might be the handmaidens of conscience.
As with all battles, how we fight determines who we become.
Every enmity with another is part of our unfinished work on ourselves; a free person has no enemies.
As we make peace with ourselves, we become more tolerant of our faults—in others.
No grace is possible—physical or spiritual—without attention.
The demon honors you by their attentions; seek to be a worthy foe.
Where there are demons, there is something precious worth fighting for.
At the heart of every vice sits selfishness, yawning.
Scars are treasure chests.
In our inverted era, the Love that dare not speak its name is Divine.
The grades of love we are ashamed to confess: from the playground crush to Divine madness.
To truly begin, again, requires utter humility.
Our salvation lies on the other side of our gravest danger.
A poem arrives like a hand in the dark.
The world of images is not that of the spirit.
There’s nothing casual about intimacy, or passing through a temple without bowing.
Where ocean and shore greet, a metaphor, for where Spirit and body meet.
Poetic ideal: a language scrubbed clean by silences.
Certain silences are more damning than words; they are actions.
Certain silences are hard to take back.
Aphorisms respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, briefly.
As protection from your lower soul, surround yourself with reminders of your higher soul.
An apocalyptic viewpoint is a veiled death wish.
Numbness is a spiritual malady, true detachment its opposite.
The contemplative life is not a passive one.
The problem with being full of yourself is that you cannot fill up with much else.
Mysticism is the disappearing act that takes a lifetime.
The true poet, and the mystic, are not too proud to admit that, in matters great and small, they cannot proceed until they receive further instructions.
You can’t bury pain and not expect it to grow roots.
If we ask life for favors, we must be prepared to return them.
To acquire a third eye, one cannot blink.
Miracles are everyday occurrences, recognizing them is not.
Mysticism teaches us that, if we can hold our breath long enough, we may breathe under water.
Yahia Lababidi began writing aphorisms as a teenager in Egypt thirty years ago. Today, he is an internationally published aphorist, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in such publications as World Literature Today, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Rain Taxi, Philosophy Now, and The Best American Poetry. His latest book is a collection of poems for Palestine entitled Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024). Poems from the collection have been translated into Arabic, French, Malayalam, Gaeilge, Spanish, and into Dutch by the poet laureate of the Netherlands, Babs Gons. During the seven days of the annual global publishing event #ReadPalestineWeek, 3,351 e-copies of Palestine Wail were downloaded directly from the publisher.
Earlier, Lababidi released Quarantine Notes (Fomite Press, 2023), a collection of his short meditations on morality and mortality; Desert Songs (Rowayat, 2022), a love letter to Egypt's deserts that features Arabic translations by Syrian poet Osama Esber and images by Moroccan photographer Zakaria Wakrim; and Learning to Pray: A Book of Longing (Kelsay Books, 2021). Lababidi is also the author of two books of aphorisms, Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press, 2019) and Where Epics Fail (Unbound, 2018). Featured on PBS NewsHour, he has spoken at Oxford University and on NPR, and his cultural essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, Krista Tippett's On Being Project, and Al Jazeera.
Lababidi’s work has appeared in several anthologies, including the bestselling Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing (Pearson), Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury), and the first anthology of contemporary American aphorists, Short Flights: Thirty-Two Modern Writers Share Aphorisms of Insight, Inspiration, and Wit (Schaffner Press). (updated 1/2025)
Read Alex Stein‘s “The Prayer of Attention: A Conversation with Yahia Lababidi,” an AGNI Online interview excerpted in Harper’s Magazine’s “Links” for April 21, 2010.
A second interview appears in AGNI 74, Alex Stein‘s “The Exquisites: A Conversation with Yahia Lababidi.”