Quotes by Muhammad Iqbal

• I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best interest of India and Islam.
• I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.
• If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
• 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.
• Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny.
• 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.
• If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion.
• 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.
• Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
• I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
• 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.
• God is not a dead equation!
• Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.
• But only a brief moment is granted to the brave one breath or two, whose wage is the long nights of the grave.
• Be not entangled in this world of days and nights; Thou hast another time and space as well.
• Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
• Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass.
• 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.
• Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?
• Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?
• When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
• Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture.
• Unbeliever is he who follows predestination even if he be Muslim, Faithful is he, if he himself is the Divine Destiny.
• Though the terror of the sea gives to none security, in the secret of the shell. Self preserving we may dwell.
• It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self.
• The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.
• Words, without power, is mere philosophy.
• 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 Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God.
• 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.
• Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.
• Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders.
• Physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind.
• Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world.
• 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.