Top 100 Arabic Quotes
#1. His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#2. I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one ... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.
Joe Strummer
#3. Gerdanlouk, he thinks. An evocative Turkish word, with Arabic roots. It means jewelry, but only jewelry adorning a woman between her lower neck and the top of her breasts. Gerdanlouk. He looks away.
Jenny White
#4. There is an Arabic writer who wrote philosophy and poetry and who brought all religions and all the world together.
Salma Hayek
#5. I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#6. Closing my eyes and holding still. It's the end if I get mad or scream. It's close to a prayer. Hate is not for humans. Judgment lies with God. That's what I learned from my Arabic brothers and sisters.
Kenji Goto
#7. That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.
G. Willow Wilson
#8. I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
Bill Gates
#9. His English was exceptional. There was a glottal sound in his voice, but it was not harsh. I'd often asked him to help me with my sparse Arabic, trying to get my pronunciation of this or that word right. "Shukran." "Afwan." "Qumbula." Thank you. You're welcome. Bomb.
Kevin Powers
#10. Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.
Ameen Rihani
#11. Poetry is practically the only intellectual pursuit which we can be positive was highly developed and much practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia. It seems certain that the Arabic word for poet, shair, meant originally "one who knows," and the word for poetry, shir, "knowledge".
Franz Rosenthal
#12. I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
Brian Eno
#13. Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.
Jim Al-Khalili
#14. The Armenian alphabet is shredded lace
squiggly, feathery and mysterious. More elongated than Arabic, more elegant than Cyrillic.
Laura Kelly
#15. Certainly, one of the greatest achievements of the human intellectual spirit was the Arabic Translation Movement. Over the course of about 100 years, virtually the entire Greek Scientific and philosophical corpus was either translated or summarized into Arabic (McGinnis, 10).
Jon McGinnis
#16. Being that the *historical* Jesus was of pure Hebraic descent- lineage of Eber- He was not an Arab or of Arabic descent, therefore He was not dark skinned as most Israeli's are not."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#17. I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion
Isaac Albeniz
#18. If there were a Jessica Chase instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing.
Olivia Cunning
#19. You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.
Hassan Blasim
#20. Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.
John Abizaid
#21. Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.
Hunter S. Thompson
#22. I do believe, given the heritage of Al Jazeera itself in Arabic and in English, I think Al Jazeera will succeed in introducing another perspective on the news that the American market is in need for.
Wadah Khanfar
#23. In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
Rabih Alameddine
#24. 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
#25. Every mujahadeen who comes in from outside the country finds an environment where Arabic is spoken. So in that sense, it's a tremendous come-on for the young in Islam. But I think much more important is, it just validates so much of what the Muslim world is predisposed to believe.
Michael Scheuer
#26. In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.
Jim Al-Khalili
#27. I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine.
Stevie Wonder
#28. Speak any language, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, but always speak with love
Rumi
#29. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.
Minae Mizumura
#30. This must be Aleppo. Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poor-lighted platform with loud furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere. Two men below her window were talking French.
Agatha Christie
#31. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
Martin Amis
#32. INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. I hate waiting on torture; an Arabic proverb says, "Waiting on torture is worse than torture." I can only confirm this proverb.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
#34. The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently.
Simon Singh
#35. The Semitic/Arabic word for [Deacon] is transliterated into English as, Shammaas; the Semitic tongue preserved its original form as, Shaman.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#36. I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.
Freya Stark
#37. We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn't want to be special. I didn't want them to be curious about me.
Richard Engel
#38. My show in Egypt was called, 'The Show,' or, 'Al Bernameg' in Arabic. Basically, it was a political satire show. It started on Internet by three, four-minute episodes, and then it evolved into a live show in a theater, which was something that was unprecedented in the Arab world.
Bassem Youssef
#39. Johnny Walker, the American that fought for the Taliban, is now talking with an Arabic accent. Have you heard him? It's ridiculous. I know how we should handle him. Let's bring him back here and take him to Cleveland Browns stadium and dress him up as a referee. They'll know how to take care of him!
Jay Leno
#40. Today, only about 1% of the World Wide Web is written in Arabic.
Marissa Mayer
#41. An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country. A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul. My
Jenny Offill
#42. I have six or seven 'what to name the baby' books, the Oxford dictionary of names, and a fabulous tome that's 26 languages in simultaneous translation - French, German, all the European majors, plus Esperanto, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Melanie Rawn
#43. I had this desire to understand Islam better and then focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic cultures. And one of the first things to emerge was Arabic calligraphy, which was instantly inspiring.
Craig Thompson
#44. I spend my night writing you love letters;The eraser
Then spend my day
Erasing each, word by word.
Your eyes are my golden compasses;
They point me toward the sea of separation!
(translated from the Arabic by Sivar Qazaz)
Ghada Samman
#45. Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.
Richard Engel
#46. I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music.
Maya Beiser
#47. My identity comprises of more than just my faith. I am a proud Muslim, but I am also a liberal, a Briton, a Pakistani, a Londoner, a father, a product of the globalised world who speaks English, Arabic and Urdu.
Maajid Nawaz
#48. There was general agreement that Brahe was correct, until Gell-Man taught the squad to swear in Arabic.
John Scalzi
#49. French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.
David Graddol
#50. I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.
Azzedine Alaia
#51. Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, but Arab culture is not the culture of Islam.
Tariq Ramadan
#52. But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.
John Abizaid
#53. The Arabic states have to be integrated into the Iraqi reconstruction. We need the help of the Arabic community, which understands its culture. Americans arrive, invade, occupy.
Neil Young
#54. But where Moabite differed from Hebrew the difference pointed to Phoenician on the one side and to Arabic on the other, rather than Aramaic.
John Courtenay James
#55. There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.
Pete Seeger
#56. Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
Elliott Colla
#57. Udru, a language common among India's Muslims, exhibits Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Indian influences. Its name derives from the Turkic word "ordu", meaning army, since it was at the Turkic army camps that these four languages intermingled.
Firas Alkhateeb
#58. As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.
Rabih Alameddine
#59. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.
Elliott Colla
#60. In France, they make you feel that you cannot be two things at the same time. You can't be French and Arabic; you can't be French and Muslim.
EL Seed
#61. Learn the literal meaning of the [Arabic] words; don't follow his explanations and interpretations. Only learn what God says. His words are divine messages, which you are free to interpret.
Malala Yousafzai
#62. I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
June Jordan
#63. You think you're going to impress an American jury with [your] words? In the eyes of the Americans, you're doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
#64. Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
#65. The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy ... The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.
Chaim Weizmann
#66. I talked to Beyonce and she wants to learn how to speak Arabic and she wants to jump out of an airplane. I don't want to do that. I just don't want to wash my hair every day.
Ellen DeGeneres
#67. I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.
Hassan Blasim
#68. It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.
EL Seed
#69. 'Khalifa' is Arabic, it means successor, leader, shining light. My granddad is Muslim and he gave me that name.
Wiz Khalifa
#70. Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness.
Paulo Coelho
#71. It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.
Hassan Blasim
#72. I'm a multi-lingual Kundalini-dancing shapeshifter to the 69th degree.
I know French, Italian, Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Greek, Latin, Gaelic, Scottish, English, and American English.
I'm cunninglingual.
Sienna McQuillen
#73. May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.
Paul Bowles
#74. God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.
As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.
I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...]
I learned God's true language is only silence and breath.
Kazim Ali
#75. Assad: 'I have written it just down here.'
He Pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
#76. If you watch a Chinese movie with subtitles, it's just like watching an Arabic movie with Chinese subtitles. That explains why you can't take Chinese language movies and expect them to go abroad.
Bruno Zheng Wu
#77. All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing.
Ibn Khaldun
#78. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
Geraldine Brooks
#79. Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc.
Rabih Alameddine
#80. Fuck the Bureau! Their entire outfit is half the size of the NYPD. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct that you guys have in the entire D.O.D.!
Brian K. Vaughan
#81. I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.
EL Seed
#82. "eL Seed" was inspired by the French play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille. It was seeing "Le Cid" coming from the Arabic name "el sayed," which means "the master, the man." So I called myself like that because I was 16; I said, "Yes, I'm the man." That's how it started.
EL Seed
#84. They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China.
Jack Weatherford
#85. Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.
Etgar Keret
#86. I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.
Kai Bird
#87. Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.
Rabih Alameddine
#88. Classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.
Jim Al-Khalili
#89. Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.
S. Jay Olshansky
#90. Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.
Marina Warner
#91. I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.
Cote De Pablo
#92. I listen to a lot of alternative types of music: I listen to a lot of Chinese music, I listen to a lot of Asian music. It might surprise you, but I listen to a lot of Arabic music. And I don't care - music is music.
Timbaland
#93. Pomegranate molasses is ubiquitous in Arabic cooking: it's sweet, sour and adds depth.
Yotam Ottolenghi
#94. It became the country's official language in the 13th century under the reign of Alfonso X el Sabio (the wise one) as he tried to unify a country that was housing a number of languages, including arabic, hebrew and latin.
Pilar Orti
#95. One of the interpreters hired by CBS for the Dan Rather/Saddam Hussein interview adopted a phony Arabic accent. You know, maybe CBS should have hired somebody with a fake Dan Rather accent to ask tougher questions.
Jay Leno
#96. We have Al Jazeera Arabic news, Al Jazeera English news, of course; we have three sports channels, and we have Al Jazeera Mubasher, which is a live channel that broadcasts live press conferences and symposiums and meetings. And, of course, we have Al Jazeera commentary in Arabic.
Wadah Khanfar
#97. A small film from a small country, in Arabic with nonprofessionals: It was practically impossible. Just to make it was like a dream to me.
Nadine Labaki
#98. To paraphrase a Latino saying (which is possibly ultimately from the Arabic traditiom), MI rasa is supposed raza." So Living in Spanglish is not a racial Istanbul text.
Ed Morales
#99. Concerted voices of heartfelt petitions in Arabic all pleading for divine intervention are abruptly silenced as the drone ensures fatalities by injecting a final stab in each of their skulls.
C.J. Anderson
#100. Abram - Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling - was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun.
Susan Wise Bauer
