Best quotes from Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born French author who has lived in France since 1976. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages. Of his several works of nonfiction, The Crusades through Arab Eyes is probably the best known. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios, as well as the 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In 2020, he was awarded the National Order of Merit by the French government. He is a member of the Académie française.

Some of the best quotes from Amin Maalouf are listed below.

1. “A community begins to fall apart the moment it agrees to abandon the weakest of its members.” – Amin Maalouf
2. “A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.” – Amin Maalouf
3. “All pleasures must be paid for, do not despise those that state their price.” – Amin Maalouf
4. “Are you certain that a man’s life begins with his birth?” – Amin Maalouf
5. “At my age, only naivete still manages to scandalize me sometimes.” – Amin Maalouf
6. “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
7. “Clawing its way towards us, the ugliness of the world tore away our hiding-place.” – Amin Maalouf
8. “Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.” – Amin Maalouf
9. “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
10. “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
11. “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
12. “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
13. “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
14. “I have always thought that Heaven invented all the problems, and Hell the solutions.” – Amin Maalouf
15. “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
16. “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
17. “I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identities. The world is a complex machine that can’t be dismantled with a screwdriver. But that shouldn’t prevent us from observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.” – Amin Maalouf
18. “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
19. “Is there a difference between being the midwife of truth, or the midwife of legends?” – Amin Maalouf
20. “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
21. “It’s better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.” – Amin Maalouf
22. “It’s not often in life that you can misbehave for the good of the cause.” – Amin Maalouf
23. “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
24. “Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.” – Amin Maalouf
25. “Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.” – Amin Maalouf
26. “Life is not so long that one can grow tired of it.” – Amin Maalouf
27. “Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.” – Amin Maalouf
28. “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
29. “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
30. “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
31. “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
32. “So I’ve become an exile without ever leaving my country.” – Amin Maalouf
33. “Some women’s arms are places of exile; others are a native land.” – Amin Maalouf
34. “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
35. “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
36. “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
37. “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
38. “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
39. “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
40. “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
41. “We die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.” – Amin Maalouf
42. “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
43. “What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!” – Amin Maalouf
44. “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
45. “When a man is rich, whether in gold or in knowledge, he must treat the poverty of others with consideration.” – Amin Maalouf
46. “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.” – Amin Maalouf
47. “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
48. “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 decolonization and then you’ll understand quite a lot.” – Amin Maalouf