Amin Maalouf Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

life is not so long that one can grow tired of it

are you certain that a man's life begins with his birth?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.