Muhammad Iqbal's Quotes

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny.

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

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

God is not a dead equation!

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

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

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

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.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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