Ameen Rihani Quotes

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.

You teacher, teach your pupils freedom in thought and deed, honesty in thought and deed, and tolerance in thought and deed.

If I were capable of assisting someone, I would do it in a manner that would cause the person seeking assistance to work, so he assists himself.

Truth breeds power, and truth never perishes.

The duties I ask of myself are obligatory for absolutely every individual, everywhere. Moreover, just as I recognize these rights and duties of others, I would like the others to recognize them form me as well.

I am for reformation by emigration. The emigration of the mind before the revolution of the state. The soul and mind must be free before one has a right to be a member of a free government.

Self-reliance leads to intellectual independence. Each man must think for himself, must train the mind to think, must habituate the soul to observe and analyze.

I am the East. I have philosophies, I have religions, who would exchange them for airplanes?

And so, the Book of Khalid was written. It is the only one I wrote in this world, having made, as I said, a brief sojourn in its civilised parts. I leave it now where I wrote it, and I hope to write other books in other worlds.

Bolshevism is the other end of Czarism.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

Freedom of the Spirit is the cornerstone of all freedom.

Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.

Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

Fire and light compete today in the East. But there is a lot of green firewood in this fire, and there is a lot of smoke in that light.

The West for me means ambition, the East contentment. My heart is ever in one, my soul in the other.

The footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately the highway of a nation.

True up-bringing is restricted to two types of welfare; the welfare of the body and that of the mind.

No boundaries exist in our breast: We are free .

An object is great in proportion to its power of resistance to time and the elements. That is why we think the pyramids are great. But see, the desert is greater than the pyramids, and the sea is greater than the desert, and the heavens are greater than the sea.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.

We are all idealists in that we are ever discontented with the present state of the Ego and the World.

Weak and oppressed nations are fundamentally spiritual; strong nations are, as a rule, chiefly materialistic.

Yes, I am calling for an intellectual revolution that sweeps away the corruption, absurdity and error, which prevail in morals, customs, traditions, and doctrines.

Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament.

Say your word and go your way.
قل كلمتك وامش

To us all, life is a gift, liberty is a right, and the pursuit of happiness is the object supreme. But our conduct in the pursuit differs in accordance with the measure of justice we uphold. A common measure is only possible when we begin to understand and learn to appreciate each other's point of view and point of direction.

All things, good and evil, come out, it seems, of the East. The Illuminati, like the Ismailites, dealt in allegories; and like the Mazdakites, they played with fire.

Foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries.

An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

True knowledge is power; but in order to feel at home with it, we must be constitutionally qualified. And if we are not, it is likely to give the soul such a twist as to deform it forever.

The religious fanatic drew a small circle and left me, the infidel, outside it. However, I, with the help of love, won over him - I drew a large circle and included him.

We must strive to form a comprehensive sublime nationalism whose first principal is national geographic unity and must strengthen this unity with deeds not with words.

The will is the spirit of perseverance, and perseverance holds clear success.

Our Phoenician ancestors never left anything they undertook unfinished. Consider what they accomplished in their days, and the degree of culture they attained.

Ignorance and fear are twins whose mother is slavery and whose father is oppression, and the mentality of the whole family is that of slaves.

Had courage, wisdom, and reason always prevailed in people, there would not have been oppressions and oppressors.

When we go deep enough or high enough, we meet. It is only on the surface that we differ and sometimes clash. True, we do not always find our way to the depth or the height, or we do not take the trouble to do so.

Society may be likened to a rod, which only a just government can balance properly.

We can not understand each other, if every time we venture out we stick the feather of cocksureness in our caps. No, we can never wholly understand each other, and rise to the level of mutual esteem at least, if we do not invest in that fellow feeling that triumphs over class and creed and race and color.

Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous.

To be sure, we would not allow the world, if we can help it, to peep into our soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's-Land is hedged about with a wire entanglement of insincerities. And often we take refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mystic mood.

My American walking shoes are new, and my Oriental eyes are old.

In the desert you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life. You discover your kinship with nature and man, which is evoked by the naturalness and the gentle humanity of the natives of the desert, and you will also discover God.

A poet is a poet, whether he rides in a Ford or on a donkey; a sage is a sage, whether he plays golf in New Jersey or bathes in the Ganges, or prays in the desert; and a fool is a fool, whether he be a maharaja or a president of a post-war republic.

What is life without its angles of difficulty and defeat, and its tip of triumph and power?

Genius everywhere is one. In the Orient and in the Occident the deep thinkers are kin, the poets are cousins, the pioneers of the spirit are the messengers of peace and good will to the world. Their works are the open highways between nations, and they themselves are the ever living guardians and guides.

Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.

In the Lakes of Light, Love and Will, I would baptize all mankind.