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Veil Quotes

Browse 38 quotes about Veil.

Veil Quotes

“I haven’t written you a poem in years it seems. How can it be my fault when the words to describe you have not yet been created? When the alphabet lacks the very letters? How can it be my fault when your loveliness only grows by the time I reach for pen and paper? Tell me how I am at fault when I am only a beginner in poems and you are exquisite poetry? To write you in words is to put a veil upon you. Why must I write when I can kiss you instead?”

“Some women wear a miniskirt to reveal their thighs; some wear one to conceal their age.”

“With my veil I put my faith on display—rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don’t see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator. You see, as a Muslim woman, I’ve been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don’t answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King.”

“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)”

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius... and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.”

“When we finally arrived, the chauffeur escorted my younger sister, Laila, and me up to my father’s suite. As usual, he was hiding behind the door waiting to scare us. We exchanged many hugs and kisses as we could possibly give in one day. My father took a good look at us. Then he sat me down on his lap and said something that I will never forget. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hana, everything that God made valuable in the world is covered and hard to get to. Where do you find diamonds? Deep down in the ground, covered and protected. Where do you find pearls? Deep down at the bottom of the ocean, covered up and protected in a beautiful shell. Where do you find gold? Way down in the mine, covered over with layers and layers of rock. You've got to work hard to get to them.” He looked at me with serious eyes. “Your body is sacred. You’re far more precious than diamonds and pearls, and you should be covered too.”

“Her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too... The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun...”

“The perpetual movement of the water, rolling from and to unknown destinations, the voices of the sea shield us from the raging furies and shrieking sounds of dystopian surroundings, creating an unwinding veil for stilled happiness, acquainting us with the gentle, cosmic rhythms of an extraneous world. They are a soothing relief and let us listen to the voices of our inner world. ("Voices of the sea" )”

“It is easy to find from the statistics pertaining to crime rate in a country that crimes against women are lowest in Islamic countries where women are dressed modestly and covered in burka (veil) in public places. Appropriate dressing, particularly in public places and before strangers can to some extent prevent crimes against women.”

“I hate this.' 'Hate what?' I asked, confused. Hawke didn't respond immediately. 'I hate talking to the veil.' 'Oh.' Understanding rippled through me as I reached up and touched the length that hid my hair. 'I imagine most people don't enjoy it.' 'I can't imagine you do.' 'I don't.' I admitted and then glanced around the room as if I expected Priestess Analia to be hiding somewhere. 'I mean, I'd prefer if people were able to see me.' He tilted his head to the side. 'What does it feel like?' Air hitched in my throat. No one... no one had ever asked me that before, and while I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about the veil, I wasn't sure how to put them into words even though I trusted Hawke. Some things, once spoken, were given a life of their own. ... 'It feels suffocating.' Hawke drew closer. 'Then why do you wear it?' 'I didn't realise I had a choice.' I looked up at him. 'You have a choice now.' He knelt in front of me. 'It's just you and me, walls, and a pathetically inadequate supply of furniture.' My lips twitched. 'Do you wear your veil when you're with Tawny?' he asked. I shook my head no. 'Then why are you wearing it now?' 'Because... I'm allowed to be without my veil with her.' 'I was told that you were supposed to be veiled at all times, even with those approved to see you.' He was, of course, correct. Hawke arched a brow. I sighed. 'I don't wear my veil when I'm in my room, and I don't expect anyone to come in other than Tawny. And I don't wear it then because I feel... more in control. I can make-' 'The choice not to wear it?' he finished for me. Nodding, I was more than a little stunned that he'd nailed it. 'You have a choice now.' 'I do.' But it was hard to explain that the veil also served as a barrier. With it, I remembered what I was, and the importance of that. Without it, well, it was easy to want... to simply want.”

“My face is my identity. No one will cover it. I’m proud of my face. If my face bothers you, don’t look. Turn your own face away, take your eyes off me. If you are seduced by merely looking at my face, that is your problem. Do not tell me to cover it. You cannot punish me simply because you cannot control yourself.”

“That's when she saw the black ink strokes, underlining four words of the poem: Door. Veil. Thee. Me. And in a flash, the code to the sultan's combination lockbox flew into her mind. D V J S. Door. Veil. Jasmine. Sultan... or sultana. Even though the meaning was still opaque, even though she still hadn't the slightest clue which door or veil her father was trying to draw her toward, something lifted in her chest as she looked at the words. Hope. He was still talking to her, communicating with her, even from another plane. "As above, so below," she whispered.”

“The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.”

“Cette image d'enfant favorite, voire un peu capricieuse, m'a longtemps collé à la peau. A tel point qu'à notre retour de déportation, lorsque ma soeur aîné a revu une amie, celle-ci a eu l'inconscience de lui lancer: "J'espère qu'au moins la déportation aura mis un peu de plomb dans la cervelle de Simone!" Losque Milou m'a rapporté la réflexion, j'ai été abasourdie. Quelle bizarre époque que ces années-là, où les gens n'avaient pas toujours conscience de l'impact de leurs propos.”

“When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination”

“In contrast, he describes spiritual transformation as an ‘established descent of the spiritual peace, light, knowledge, power, bliss from above, the awareness of the self and the divine and of a higher cosmic consciousness and the change of the whole consciousness to that’.18 The path to spiritual transformation leads the seeker through several experiences and realizations: temporary stages of peace, calm and silence; the discovery of the Self and its experience on various planes of consciousness; and experiences on the higher planes with its different layers—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Overmind. Not only to receive influences from these planes, but to actually live in them is, according to Sri Aurobindo, ‘a definite stage in the movement towards transformation’.19 Finally, we learn about the two main and alternating movements leading to spiritual transformation—the ascent of the lower consciousness towards the higher, and the descent of the higher, of peace, force, light and Ananda, into the lower to transform it. These and the experiences connected with them end this remarkable journey from the first opening of the inner veil to the psychic and spiritual transformation of all the planes and parts of the being, opening the gate to the essence and crown of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga: the supramental transformation.”

“In the realm of Maya's veil, Where illusions dance and sway, Ram and Krishna, wise and true, Saw through the world's ephemeral hue. Allah, the All-Merciful, proclaimed, "This mortal stage, a fleeting game, Where egos strut and passions flare, A testing ground, a soul's repair." Muhammad, the Prophet of Light, Expounded on the material plight, A transient realm, a fragile guise, Where true treasures lie beyond the skies. Oh, heed their words, their wisdom deep, And seek the essence, the soul to keep, For in the depths of spirit's embrace, Lies true reality, time's endless chase.”

“Many of us are contemplatives by catastrophe. We start seeing beyond the veil only when it is rent by some crisis, personal, or societal, or both, that reveals things as they are.”

“6. In the holy instant nothing happens that has not always been. ²Only the veil that has been drawn across reality is lifted. ³Nothing has changed. ⁴Yet the awareness of changelessness comes swiftly as the veil of time is pushed aside. ⁵No one who has not yet experienced the lifting of the veil, and felt himself drawn irresistibly into the light behind it, can have faith in love without fear.”