Muhammad Iqbal Quotations

I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.

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.

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

It may, however, be said that the level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot yield any knowledge of a universal character, for concepts alone are capable of being socialized.

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

It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to share his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

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

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.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

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

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.

The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.

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

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

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

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.

The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.

The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.

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

That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand its original significance.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny.

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

But only a brief moment is granted to the brave one breath or two, whose wage is the long nights of the grave.

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

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

It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self.

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

Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders.

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

But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best interest of India and Islam.

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge.

Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge.

But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people's entry into the main current of world-events.

Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.

Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.

The Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

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

Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Divine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul's contact with the body.

Physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind.

Thou doest not know thy own destiny and doest not know that it gets its worth from thee - otherwise the luminous ruby is only a piece of stone.

If your liver becomes blood through this your destiny, then ask God for another destiny. It is possible that you request from God another destiny.

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.

Our bread and water are of one table: the progeny of Adam are as a single soul.

British physician, West African Countries and Peoples Man's place is higher than the sky. Respect for man is the underlying spirit of civilization.

Everything that possesses life dies if it has to live in uncongenial surroundings.

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

The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.

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

It is absolutely certain that God does exist.

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 possessor of a sound heart puts to test his power by entering into big adventures.

God is not a dead equation!

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.

It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal.

The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain

In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.

Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

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

I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word religion, as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism.

Human intellect is natures attempt at self criticism

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

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.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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.