Amin Maalouf Quotes

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.

Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.

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.