G M Syed Quotes & Sayings

Bush didn't do one thing wrong....
He did everything wrong. — Syed Ali

It's not love that you hate, it's the loved one who betrayed. — Syed Arshad

It is probably worth stating here that nobody wants to fail. We all want to succeed, whether we are entrepreneurs, sportsmen, politicians, scientists, or parents. But at a collective level, at the level of systemic complexity, success can only happen when we admit our mistakes, learn from them, and create a climate where it is, in a certain sense, "safe" to fail. — Matthew Syed

Man is like an island set in isolation in a fathomless sea enveloped by darkness, saying that the loneliness his self knows is so utterly absolute because even he knows not his self completely. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

All human beings posses real age to others who have spend in fact realize to ourselves to be factor from the live life such a naturally holding the remaining rest will be count that who have command of all human beings those ourselves will be real age which are going on. — Syed Afroz Alam

When two peoples share a common passion: they are capable of empathising with each other's misery. — Matthew Syed

When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly," Ericsson has said. "Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well - or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can't do that you turn into the expert you want to become." So far the focus in this book has been on the quantity of practice required to reach the top, and we've seen that it's a staggering amount of time, stretching for a period of at least ten years. — Matthew Syed

Psychologists often make a distinction between mistakes where we already know the right answer and mistakes where we don't. A medication error, for example, is a mistake of the former kind: the nurse knew she should have administered Medicine A but inadvertently administered Medicine B, perhaps because of confusing labeling combined with pressure of time. But sometimes mistakes are consciously made as part of a process of discovery. Drug companies test lots of different combinations of chemicals to see which have efficacy and which don't. Nobody knows in advance which will work and which won't, but this is precisely why they test extensively, and fail often. It is integral to progress. — Matthew Syed

Never reject an idea because it will create conflict! — Syed Ather

Fiction is but truth.. tweaked or disguised. — Syed Arshad

I am a hair-lock; I am floating in the gutters to meet the rubber-band. — Amaan Ahmad

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted - and their knowledge deepened - by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all. — Matthew Syed

The world of man in the world of nature, cannot be change without physical appearance leads to positive possess by the initial human nature and could be change by habits of man. — Syed Afroz Alam

Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence. — Matthew Syed

Power and money in evil hands have caused all the miseries of the world so far. Both have devastated poorer countries in particular. There must be checks in the exercise of political and military power, and a ceiling on wealth (of all varieties). Governance in a situation of unequal hold on power and wealth is a sham. The pundits who write and lecture so much on governance should do well to learn this basic concept. — Syed Abdus Samad

If you do not waste, you do not want. — Syed Ather

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: "it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error", so that they might suggest their own futile substitute. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practicing with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it. — Matthew Syed

Do not show the face of Islam to others; instead show your face as the follower of true Islam representing character, knowledge, tolerance and piety — Syed Ahmad Khan

Justice implies knowledge of the right and proper place for a thing or a being to be; of right as against wrong; of the mean and limit; of spiritual gain as against loss; of truth as against falsehood. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Today I meet with Dr. Syamsuddin Arif. He said Prof. al-Attas says, I don't read much but I think a lot — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don't achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel - as we'll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads. — Matthew Syed

Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance. — Matthew Syed

Creativity is, in many respects, a response. — Matthew Syed

Islam is a religion based upon knowledge, and a denial of the possibility and objectivity of knowledge would involve the destruction of the fundamental basis upon which not only the religion, but all the sciences are rooted. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.6 It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be. — Matthew Syed

It's not about being liberal or conservative, it's about being human.
It's not about being rich or poor, it's about being alive and happy.
It's not about being right, it's about being considerate and compassionate. — Karen L. Syed

The secularizing 'values' and events that have been predicted would happen in the Muslim world have now begun to unfold with increasing momentum and persistence due still to the Muslims' lack of understanding of the true nature and implications of secularization as a philosophical program. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

The feeling cannot be described in words, it's mystical; I am changing. Perhaps the soul needed silence so that it can shout to hear the echo from the walls of my heart. It did heard something, Sufism! — Dr. S.U.A.H Syed

It is like the thirsty traveller who at first sincerely sought the water of knowledge, but who later, having found it plain perhaps, proceeded to temper his cup with the salt of doubt so that his thirst now becomes insatiable though he drinks incessantly, and that in thus drinking the water that cannot slake his thirst, he has forgotten the original and true purpose for which the water was sought. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas