Ibn Arabi Quotes

Each person is oriented toward a quest for his personal invisible guide, or ... he entrusts himself to the collective, magisterial authority as the intermediary between himself and Revelation.

When you know yourself, your 'I'ness vanishes and you know that you and Allah are one and the same.

My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Quran.
My creed is Love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.

Do not praise your own faith exclusively so that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this you will miss much good. Nay, you will miss the whole truth of the matter. God, the Omniscient and the Omnipresent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for He says in the Quran, wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah. Everybody praises what he knows. His God is his own creature, and in praising it, he praises himself. Which he would not do if he were just, for his dislike is based on ignorance.

I was wedded to all the stars of the sky.There was not a single star left, and I married every one of them with great spiritual pleasure. Then I married the moon.

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you - indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you. Be in yourself a matter for all forms of belief, for God is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than another.

The Real made me contemplate the light of the veils as the star of strong backing rose, and He said to me, "Do you know how many veils I have veiled you with?"
"No", I replied.
He said, "With seventy veils.
Even if you raise them you will not see Me, and if you do not raise them you will not see Me."
"If you raise them you will see Me and if you do not raise them you will see Me."
"Take care of burning yourself!"
"You are My sight, so have faith. You are My Face, so veil yourself

I follow the Way of Love,
and where Love's caravan takes its path,
there is my religion, my faith.

Whoever builds his faith exclusively on demonstrative proofs and deductive arguments, builds a faith on which it is impossible to rely. For he is affected by the negativities of constant objections. Certainty(al-yaqin) does not derive from the evidences of the mind but pours out from the depths of the heart.

None but God is loved in the existent things. It is He who is manifest within every beloved to the eye of every lover – and there is nothing in the existent realm that is not a lover

When a man loves a woman, he desires union, that is, the goal of union which exists in love.
In the elemental form, there is no greater union than marriage. (10) By this appetite
encompasses all parts. For that reason, complete ritual washing is prescribed after
intercourse. Purification envelops him as annihilation in the woman was complete in the
obtainment of appetite. Allah is very jealous of His slave if He believes that he finds pleasure
in other than Him. So man purifies himself by ritual washing in order to return to Him in
whom he was annihilated, since that is all there is.

You only know the universe according to the amount you know the shadows, and you are
ignorant of the Real according to what you do not know of the person on which that shadow
depends. Inasmuch as He has a shadow, He is known, and inasmuch as one is ignorant of
what is in the essence of the shadow of the form which projects the shadow, he is ignorant of
Allah. For that reason, we say that Allah is known to us from one aspect and not known to us
from another aspect.

Oh, Lord, nourish me not with love, but with the desire for love.

It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.

al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya

In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life

I am in love with no other than myself, and my very separation is my union ... I am my beloved and my lover; I am my knight and my maiden.

Deliver us, O Allah, from the Sea of Names.

Oh, her beauty
the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.
She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,
A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the deeps of that ocean.
He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills, because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures.

My heart can be pasture for deer and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and a Kaaba for the pilgrims. It is both the tables of the Torah and the Koran. It professes the religion of Love wherever its caravans are heading. Love is my law. Love is my faith.

How can the heart travel to God, when it is chained by its desires?

God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.

If it had not been for this love, the universe would not have appeared in its source. Its
movement from non-existence to existence is the movement of the love of the One who
brings into existence for this purpose. The universe also loves to witness itself in existence as
it was witnessed in immutability. Thus by every aspect, the movement from immutable non-
existence to the existence of the sources is a movement of love, both in respect of Allah and
in respect to itself.

There was a time, when I blamed my companion if his religion did not resemble mine. Now, however, my heart accepts every form ... Love alone is my religion.