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.
Generally, we admire the thing we are not.
Don't let people tell you to do it this way. You are on the verge of figuring out hybrid models -- with companies and nonprofits, markets, government, crowd-sourced philanthropy. The capitalist system as we know it is not working.
History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We're in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.
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