"I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay."
Quotes by Muhammad Iqbal
42 quotes
Sir Muhammad Iqbal was an Islamic philosopher and poet. His poetry in Urdu is considered among the greatest of the 20th century, and his vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British India is widely regarded as having animated the impulse behind the Pakistan Movement. The honorific commonly refers to him as Allamah and is widely considered one of the most important and influential Muslim thinkers and Islamic religious philosophers of the 20th century.
Quotes by Topic
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Life
View all Life quotes →"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."
"Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass."
"The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery."
"Islam is itself destiny and will not suffer destiny."
"Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity."
"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."
"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Experience
View all Experience quotes →"The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable."
"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."
"But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Philosophy
View all Philosophy quotes →"Words, without power, is mere philosophy."
"When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry."
"Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Religion
View all Religion quotes →Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Travel
View all Travel quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Freedom
View all Freedom quotes →"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 Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Truth
View all Truth quotes →Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Art
View all Art quotes →Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Time
View all Time quotes →"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."
"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Wisdom
View all Wisdom quotes →Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Action
View all Action quotes →"The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Character
View all Character quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Power
View all Power quotes →"It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Loneliness
View all Loneliness quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Hope
View all Hope quotes →"If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Dreams
View all Dreams quotes →"Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Justice
View all Justice quotes →"A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Education
View all Education quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Politics
View all Politics quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Nature
View all Nature quotes →"I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Science
View all Science quotes →"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."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Death
View all Death quotes →"Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians."
Muhammad Iqbal quotes on Love
View all Love quotes →"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."