Amin Maalouf Quotes

#1. A community begins to fall apart the moment it agrees to abandon the weakest of its members.

Amin Maalouf

#2. I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.

Amin Maalouf

#3. The pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful.

Amin Maalouf

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

Amin Maalouf

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

Amin Maalouf

#6. You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot.

Amin Maalouf

#7. When faced with a chaotic and convoluted situation, one always thinks that it will take centuries to sort it out. Suddenly a man appears and as if by magic, the tree we thought was doomed takes on new life and starts bearing leaves and fruits and giving shade. (Shireen in Samarkand)

Amin Maalouf

#8. I look at the world and my own life as if I were a stranger. I wish for nothing, except perhaps that time would stop.

Amin Maalouf

#9. You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Amin Maalouf

#10. Clawing its way towards us, the ugliness of the world tore away our hiding-place.

Amin Maalouf

#11. 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

#12. I have always thought that Heaven invented all the problems, and Hell the solutions.

Amin Maalouf

#13. Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.

Amin Maalouf

#14. Perhaps writing only arouses the passions in order to allay them, as beaters flush out the game in order to expose it to the hunter's arrows.

Amin Maalouf

#15. Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.

Amin Maalouf

#16. So I've become an exile without ever leaving my country.

Amin Maalouf

#17. The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions.

Amin Maalouf

#18. During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

Amin Maalouf

#19. 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

#20. ...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.

Amin Maalouf

#21. In my prayers, I want to say: Lord, don't be far from me, and also don't come too close. Let me contemplate the stars on the texture of your cloth, but don't unveil your face to me. Allow me to hear the rivers that you send running, but Lord! Lord! Don't allow me hearing your voice

Amin Maalouf

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Is there a difference between being the midwife of truth, or the midwife of legends?

Amin Maalouf

#25. 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

#26. Life is not so long that one can grow tired of it

Amin Maalouf

#27. I am the son of the road , my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return

Amin Maalouf

#28. Are you certain that a man's life begins with his birth?

Amin Maalouf

#29. By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

Amin Maalouf

#30. Some women's arms are placed of exile; others are a native land.

Amin Maalouf

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

Amin Maalouf

#32. Virtue becomes unhealthy if it is not softened by some misdemeanors, and faith quickly becomes cruel if is not subdued by certain doubts.

Amin Maalouf

#33. The truth is rarely buried; it is merely lying in wait behind veils of modesty, pain, or indifference; the one necessary prerequisite is a passionate desire to lift the veils.

Amin Maalouf

#34. I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do.

Amin Maalouf

#35. At my age, only naivete still manages to scandalize me sometimes.

Amin Maalouf

#36. 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

#37. The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.

Amin Maalouf

#38. What's a year in comparison with eternity? what's a day? an hour? a second? Such measures have meaning only for a heart that's still beating.

Amin Maalouf

#39. 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

#40. I came from here, you came from there.
And now we're both sitting at the same table.

Amin Maalouf

#41. We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.

Amin Maalouf

#42. Don't be so timid! When you were a child, didn't you speak out the truth that the oldest ones kept secret? Well, you were right then. You must find the time of innocence in yourself again, because that was also the time of courage.

Amin Maalouf

#43. What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!

Amin Maalouf

#44. 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

#45. Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.

Amin Maalouf

#46. It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

Amin Maalouf

#47. Some women's arms are places of exile; others are a native land.

Amin Maalouf

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

Amin Maalouf

#49. It's not often in life that you can misbehave for the good of the cause

Amin Maalouf

#50. When a man is rich, whether in gold or in knowledge, he must treat the poverty of others with consideration.

Amin Maalouf

#51. People always manage to 'prove' what they want to believe; they'd be just as well off if they tried to prove the opposite.

Amin Maalouf

#52. Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can't see us.

Amin Maalouf