Muhammad Iqbal Quotes

Be aware of your own worth, use all of your power to achieve it. Create an ocean from a dewdrop. Do not beg for light from the moon, obtain it from the spark within you.

People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.

From your past emerges the present, and from the present is born your future.

Look at the evils of the world around you and protect yourself from them. Our teachers give all the wrong messages to our youth, since they take away the natural flare from the soul. Take it from me that all knowledge is useless until it is connected with your life, because the purpose of knowledge is nothing but to show you the splendors of yourself!

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

If one cannot live the life of the brave, then it is better to die like the brave.

Life is a struggle and not a matter of privilege. It is nothing but one's knowledge of the temporal and the spiritual world.

I tell you the sign of a believer; When Death comes, there is a smile on his lips

Democracy is a system where people are counted not weighed.

If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion.

When the thinking of a people becomes corrupt, the pure silver becomes impure in its hands.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

My ancestors were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of god. I am spending my life in search of man.

It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising.

I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

The man of Love follows the path of God-and shows affection to both the believer and the nonbe-liever.

The intellect of two thousand asses cannot bring forth a single man's thought.

Preserve your history and become everlasting; receive new life from the times that have gone by.

A community receives light from its history, it becomes aware of itself by remembrance of its history.

Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass.

Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture.

Human intellect is natures attempt at self criticism

The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.

Unbeliever is he who follows predestination even if he be Muslim, Faithful is he, if he himself is the Divine Destiny.

A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.

I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.

let this be our beautiful departure from stagnation; let our minds come alive; enter another dimension; go beyond the stars eagerly struggling to find that... which our naked eyes did not know existed; rise like a falcon born to soar and not be alone but be present amongst others.

Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.

Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny.

Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?

It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity - by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal - has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.

The religion of that prophet [Karl Marx] who knew not the truth, is founded upon equality of the belly.

Destiny is the prison and chain of the ignorant. Understand that destiny like the water of the Nile: Water before the faithful, blood before the unbeliever.

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.

I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.

Though the terror of the sea gives to none security, in the secret of the shell. Self preserving we may dwell.

Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

We have strayed away from God, and He is in quest of us; Like us, He is humble and is a prisoner of desire: He is hidden in every atom, and yet is a stranger to us: He is revealed in the moonlight, and in the embrace of houses.

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

Be not entangled in this world of days and nights; Thou hast another time and space as well.

Conduct, which involves a decision of the ultimate fate of the agent cannot be based on illusions.

The Westerners have lost the vision of heaven, they go hunting for the pure spirit in the belly. The pure soul takes not color and scent from the body, and Communism has nothing to do save with the body.

I tell the truth: your enemy is also your friend-his presence makes your life fuller and richer.