Muhammad Iqbal

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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