Ameen Rihani Quotes

In the desert you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life. You discover your kinship with nature and man, which is evoked by the naturalness and the gentle humanity of the natives of the desert, and you will also discover God.

My first wish is to be simple in my actions, truthful in my speech, honest in my opinions, and natural in my behavior. In other words, I want to be clean in mind, heart, and body.

When we go deep enough or high enough, we meet. It is only on the surface that we differ and sometimes clash. True, we do not always find our way to the depth or the height, or we do not take the trouble to do so.

Truth breeds power, and truth never perishes.

Whether you were Moslem, Christian, Druze, or Israeli, remember, God protect thee, that religious fanaticism for political goals or political fanaticism for religious purposes is the worst kind of fanaticism.

Ignorance and fear are twins whose mother is slavery and whose father is oppression, and the mentality of the whole family is that of slaves.

To us all, life is a gift, liberty is a right, and the pursuit of happiness is the object supreme. But our conduct in the pursuit differs in accordance with the measure of justice we uphold. A common measure is only possible when we begin to understand and learn to appreciate each other's point of view and point of direction.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

The religious fanatic drew a small circle and left me, the infidel, outside it. However, I, with the help of love, won over him - I drew a large circle and included him.

The West for me means ambition, the East contentment. My heart is ever in one, my soul in the other.

The duties I ask of myself are obligatory for absolutely every individual, everywhere. Moreover, just as I recognize these rights and duties of others, I would like the others to recognize them form me as well.

Our Phoenician ancestors never left anything they undertook unfinished. Consider what they accomplished in their days, and the degree of culture they attained.

Fire and light compete today in the East. But there is a lot of green firewood in this fire, and there is a lot of smoke in that light.

Self-reliance leads to intellectual independence. Each man must think for himself, must train the mind to think, must habituate the soul to observe and analyze.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

The heart yields spontaneity; the mind bends to understanding.

I am the East. I have philosophies, I have religions, who would exchange them for airplanes?

... And if Europe gives Arabia a railway, Arabia gives Europe an idea - which I think balances the account.

Genius everywhere is one. In the Orient and in the Occident the deep thinkers are kin, the poets are cousins, the pioneers of the spirit are the messengers of peace and good will to the world. Their works are the open highways between nations, and they themselves are the ever living guardians and guides.

My American walking shoes are new, and my Oriental eyes are old.

I am for reformation by emigration. The emigration of the mind before the revolution of the state. The soul and mind must be free before one has a right to be a member of a free government.

We can not understand each other, if every time we venture out we stick the feather of cocksureness in our caps. No, we can never wholly understand each other, and rise to the level of mutual esteem at least, if we do not invest in that fellow feeling that triumphs over class and creed and race and color.

What is life without its angles of difficulty and defeat, and its tip of triumph and power?

I want to accept all the difficulties that face me in life with perseverance and patience.

The footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately the highway of a nation.

Knowledge is one of our direst needs. But it is insufficient on its own. If knowledge was stripped from true up-bringing, it would increase man's strength, but not his morals.

Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

If I were capable of assisting someone, I would do it in a manner that would cause the person seeking assistance to work, so he assists himself.

True knowledge is power; but in order to feel at home with it, we must be constitutionally qualified. And if we are not, it is likely to give the soul such a twist as to deform it forever.

The broader and higher aspects of life are international.... There is a goal towards which all nations gravitate, and there is a common ground upon which all nations meet.

... However, there is another method, other than revolution, which is that of natural evolution, or rather the intellectual method with all its modes of education and up-bringing.

We have to dissolve all the denominations in order to form from them the greater denomination of the homeland.

I state the threefold purpose of my travels in Arabia: to see the country, to write about it and to be of some service to its people and their cause - that is what brought me from beyond the seas, from America.

I proceeded in my national mission, seeking to pave the way for an understanding between His Majesty and the other ruling princes of Arabia.

We must strive to form a comprehensive sublime nationalism whose first principal is national geographic unity and must strengthen this unity with deeds not with words.

In the Lakes of Light, Love and Will, I would baptize all mankind.

If I had in me something that inspires people towards the good and raises them one step on the ladder of mental and spiritual progress, I want to show it by example, indication, and deduction, not by preaching, threatening, and conspiring.

I renounce falsehood, whatsoever be the guise it assumes, and I embrace truth, wheresoever I find it.

I deposit in many banks including the bank of wisdom. The more I draw on my accounts, no matter how big the sum, the bigger my balance becomes

An object is great in proportion to its power of resistance to time and the elements. That is why we think the pyramids are great. But see, the desert is greater than the pyramids, and the sea is greater than the desert, and the heavens are greater than the sea.

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth always repeats itself.

Training the will in trivial and grave matters increases its strength and flexibility, and enables man to constantly strive and persevere.

No boundaries exist in our breast: We are free .

The will is the spirit of perseverance, and perseverance holds clear success.

We can not understand each other, if our sympathies are always safely tucked away; we can not understand each other, if our approaches are always academic or conventional; we can not understand each other, if we crawl back into our shells every time we see a worm across our path.

Yes, I am calling for an intellectual revolution that sweeps away the corruption, absurdity and error, which prevail in morals, customs, traditions, and doctrines.

At this moment, my soul is in Lebanon, my heart in Paris, and my body in New York.

Freedom of the Spirit is the cornerstone of all freedom.

Mutual tolerance is the stepping stone to mutual respect. A hospitable mind is the key to a neighboring or an alien spirit, looked by dogma and guarded by tradition.

True up-bringing is restricted to two types of welfare; the welfare of the body and that of the mind.