Quotes by Amin Maalouf

“Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness ...”

“Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without w...”

“The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child...”

“let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to h...”

“Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time an...”

“Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.”

“You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisatio...”

“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.”

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

“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”

“Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts an...”

“I no more believe in simplistic solutions than I do in simplistic identieties. The world is a complex machine that can't be dismantled with a srewdriver. But that shouldn't prevent us from observin...”

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

“The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communi...”

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

“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. ”

“... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.”

“People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just th...”

“I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge ...”

“Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness ...”