Amin Maalouf Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

Amin Maalouf
God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.

Amin Maalouf
For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.

Amin Maalouf
Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.

Amin Maalouf
Let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite.

Amin Maalouf
Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

Amin Maalouf
Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?

Amin Maalouf
Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

Amin Maalouf
What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself

Amin Maalouf
Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Amin Maalouf
A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Amin Maalouf
How do I pray? I study a rose, I count the stars, I marvel at the beauty of creation and how perfectly ordered it is, at man, the most beautiful work of the Creator, his brain thirsting for knowledge, his heart for love, and his senses, all his senses alert or gratified.

Amin Maalouf
Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.

Amin Maalouf
All pleasures must be paid for, do not despise those that state their price.

Amin Maalouf
We die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

Amin Maalouf
The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Amin Maalouf