My ancestors were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of god. I am spending my life in search of man.
Interpretation
Iqbal emphasizes the importance of understanding humanity over merely seeking divine meaning.
In this quote, Muhammad Iqbal reflects on the shift from spiritual pursuit to a focus on human connections and societal understanding. While his ancestors dedicated their lives to the search for understanding of God, Iqbal posits that true enlightenment comes from searching for and understanding humanity, highlighting the relevance of human relationships and societal issues in one's spiritual journey.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of human connections in spiritual journeys.
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
let this be our beautiful departure from stagnation; let our minds come alive; enter another dimension; go beyond the stars eagerly struggling to find that... which our naked eyes did not know existed; rise like a falcon born to soar and not be alone but be present amongst others.
The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.
The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.
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.
The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.
It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.
Except a man be born again, he will wish one day he had never been born at all.
Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. This is what I call nisarga yoga, the Natural yoga. It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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