Quotes by Muhammad Iqbal

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

"Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"God is not a dead equation!"

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

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

"Words, without power, is mere philosophy."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."