Best 41 quotes of Amin Maalouf on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity

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.

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.

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.

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

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

And justice lies in appearance, at least in this world, at least in the eyes of the multitude.

A qui donc appartient le monde ? A aucune race en particulier, à aucune nation en particulier. Il appartient, plus qu'à d'autres moments de l'Histoire, à tous ceux qui veulent s'y tailler une place.Il appartient à tous ceux qui cherchent à saisir les nouvelles règles du jeu - aussi déroutante soient-elles - pour les utiliser à leur avantage.

Bilge kişilerden biri evindeki bir pencereye üç güvercin yerleştirmiş. Biri öldürülüp tüyleri yolunmuş, üstüne de bir kağıt bırakılmış. "Bu dönme en son gidecektir." İkinci güvercin öldürülmeden yolunmuş. Onun üstündeki yazı "Dönme beklenilenden biraz erken gitti" imiş. Üçüncü güvercin ise hem sağmış hem de tüyleri yolunmamış. Onun üstündeki kağıtta da "ilk önce gidecek olan bu" yazılıymış...

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do. The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that--the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love.

Ceux qui ne pourront pas assumer leur propre diversité se retrouveront parfois parmi les plus virulents des tueurs identitaires, s'acharnant sur ceux qui représentent cette part d'eux-mêmes qu'ils voudraient faire oublier. Une "haine de soi" dont on a vu de nombreux exemples à travers l'Histoire...

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

En chacun de nous existe un Mr Hyde; le tout est d’empêcher que les conditions d'émergence du monstre ne soient rassemblées.

Fakat Denia`lı ozanlardan birinin dediği gibi yazgı bir bukalemunun derisinden bile daha değişkendir.

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.

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

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

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

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.

... 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.

The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.

Yes indeed, both Muslim and Jewish!I, her father, am Muslim, at least on paper; her mother is Jewish, at least in theory. With us, religion is transmitted through the father; among Jews, through the mother. Therefore, according to the Muslims, Nadia was Muslim; according to the Jews, she was Jewish. She herself might have chosen one or the other, or neither, she chose to be both at once...Yes, both at once and more. She was proud of all the bloodlines that had converged in her, roads of conquest or exile from central Asia, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Arab, Bessarabia, Armenia, Bavaria...She refused to divide out her blood, her soul.

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.