Best 51 quotes of Tahar Ben Jelloun on MyQuotes

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

An individual voice can be heard in a choir that otherwise sings in unison. This is something that is not excused.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.

Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I am glad to have found a readership, but one can’t write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper. A writer creates an imaginary world that he transmits to others.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

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.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

I'd thought sexuality was instinctive or natural, but it's profoundly linked to inner security and cultural context.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.

It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.

It is through accepting other people in our own countries that we shall come to respect our neighbours and be respected in our turn.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.

My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.

My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.

Our steps invent the path as we proceed; behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go... -- Tahar ben Jelloun

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

The power of the word in Morocco belonged to men and to the authorities. No one asked the point of view of poor people or women.

There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

We must have our say, not through violence, aggression or fear. We must speak out calmly and forcefully. We shall only be able to enter the new world era if we agree to engage in dialogue with the other side.

We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

But you'll see, you can feel time on the wind it whips up as it passes. We don't worry about time or the wind. Nothing can touch us any more. As long as people remember us, we are here. Anyway, it's the wind that tells us, lets us know about the thigs we've left behind.

Did my father talk to me? It's true, he didn't say a lot to me, but I knew what had to be done. No need for big speeches. He taught me the fundamentals of our religion: My son, Islam is simple: you are alone responsible for yourself before God, so if you are good, you will find goodness in the afterlife, and if you are bad, you'll find that instead. There's no mystery: everything depends on how you treat people, especially the weak, the poor, so Islam, that means you pray, you address the Creator and don't do evil around you, don't lie, don't steal, don't betray your wife or your country, don't kill- but do I really need to remind you of this?

I do not question anyone anymore. I drink coffee and I live.

I have at least the whole of my life to answer a question: Who am I? And who is the other? A gust of wind at dawn? A motionless landscape? A trembling leaf? A coil of white smoke above a mountain? I write all these words and I hear the wind, not outside, but inside my head. A strong wind, it rattles the shutters through which I enter the dream.

Man is more noble dead than alive, because in returning to the earth he becomes earth, and nothing is nobler than the earth that entombs us, closes our eyes, and blossoms in a beautiful eterneity.

Outside, not only over our pit but above all far away from it, there was life. You could not think too much about it, but I liked to imagine it so as not to die of forgetfulness. Imagine, and not remember. Life, the real one, not that dirty rag blowing across the ground, no, life in its exquisite beauty. I mean in its simplicity, its marvelous banality: a child smiling after tears; eyes blinking in too bright light; a woman trying on a dress; a man asleep on the grass. A horse galloping across a plain. A man wearing many-colored wings attempting to fly. A tree bending to shade a woman sitting on a stone. The sun drifts off, and you even see a rainbow. Life: it's being able to raise your arm, rub the back of your neck, stretch for the pure pleasure of it, get up and stroll aimlessly, watch people go by, stop, read a newspaper - or simply stay sitting at your window because you have nothing to do and it's nice to do nothing.

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors.

Respecter une femme, c'est pouvoir envisager l'amitié avec elle ; ce qui n'exclut pas le jeu de la séduction, et même, dans certains cas, le désir et l'amour.