Muhammad Iqbal Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and then die in the hands of politicians.

Muhammad Iqbal
I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

Muhammad Iqbal
Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

Muhammad Iqbal
The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.

Muhammad Iqbal
The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

Muhammad Iqbal
The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

Muhammad Iqbal
Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge.

Muhammad Iqbal
The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.

Muhammad Iqbal
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.

Muhammad Iqbal
But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

Muhammad Iqbal
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Muhammad Iqbal
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.

Muhammad Iqbal
Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities.

Muhammad Iqbal
Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.

Muhammad Iqbal
Divine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul's contact with the body.

Muhammad Iqbal
I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word religion, as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism.

Muhammad Iqbal
It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to share his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes.

Muhammad Iqbal
The Westerners have lost the vision of heaven, they go hunting for the pure spirit in the belly. The pure soul takes not color and scent from the body, and Communism has nothing to do save with the body.

Muhammad Iqbal
Our bread and water are of one table: the progeny of Adam are as a single soul.

Muhammad Iqbal
Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.

Muhammad Iqbal
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

Muhammad Iqbal
That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand its original significance.

Muhammad Iqbal
Physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind.

Muhammad Iqbal
"Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned." These are the words of a great Muslim saint, 'AbdulQuddës of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of "unitary experience"; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large.

Muhammad Iqbal
My ancestors were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of god. I am spending my life in search of man.

Muhammad Iqbal
But only a brief moment is granted to the brave one breath or two, whose wage is the long nights of the grave.

Muhammad Iqbal
It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity – by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal – has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.

Muhammad Iqbal
Human intellect is natures attempt at self criticism

Muhammad Iqbal
It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal.

Muhammad Iqbal
The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.

Muhammad Iqbal