Amin Maalouf quotes

Amin Maalouf is a French-Lebanese author renowned for his novels exploring themes of identity, exile, and cultural intersections. His works, including “Leo Africanus” and “Samarkand,” have been translated into numerous languages and received international acclaim. He is celebrated for bridging Eastern and Western perspectives through richly woven narratives. Here are 12 of his quotes:

For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.

Amin Maalouf

I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

Amin Maalouf

Let your tears roll tonight, but tomorrow you will start the battle again. What defeats us, always, is just our own sorrow.

Amin Maalouf

I am the son of the road, my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return.

Amin Maalouf

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Amin Maalouf

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Amin Maalouf

We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.

Amin Maalouf

During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

Amin Maalouf

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.

Amin Maalouf

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

Amin Maalouf