“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”
Amin Maalouf“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 and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity”
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“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 people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do.”
Amin Maalouf“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 observing, from trying to understand, from discussing, and sometimes suggesting a subject for reflection.”
Amin Maalouf“... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.”
Amin Maalouf, Orígenes“Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.”
Amin Maalouf, Orígenes“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.”
Amin Maalouf, Orígenes“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 of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.”
Amin Maalouf, Orígenes“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 was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?”
Amin Maalouf, Orígenes