Ibn Sina Quotes

I searched for God among the Christians and on the Cross and therein I found Him not. I went into the ancient temples of idolatry; no trace of Him was there. I entered the mountain cave of Hira and then went as far as Qandhar but God I found not. With set purpose I fared to the summit of Mount Caucasus and found there only 'anqa's habitation. Then I directed my search to the Kaaba, the resort of old and young; God was not there even. Turning to philosophy I inquired about him from ibn Sina but found Him not within his range. I fared then to the scene of the Prophet's experience of a great divine manifestation only a "two bow-lengths' distance from him" but God was not there even in that exalted court. Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.

Absence of understanding does not warrant absence of existence

Time is merely a feature of our memories and expectations.

برخی از اطبا می گویند: مالیخولیا از جنّیان است. برای ما در طب فرقی ندارد که از جن باشد یا نه. ما می گوییم: چه از جن باشد یا نباشد، مزاج بیمار سودایی می شود. پس علت قریبه اش وجود سوداست، بگذار علت العلل سودا، جن باشد.

Ich hört' in meiner Bücherei des Nachts Den Bücherwurm den Schmetterling befragen: "Ich habe mein Nest in Ibn Sinas Blättern, Bin in Farabis Manuskript beschlagen - Den Sinn des Lebens hab' ich nicht verstanden, Ganz sonnenlos leb' ich in finstern Tagen!" Wie schön sprach darauf der halbverbrannte Falter: "Nach diesem Punkt darfst du nicht Bücher fragen: Nur Fieberglut kann neues Leben bringen, Nur Fieberflut gibt deinem Leben Schwingen!

المستعد للشىء تكفيه أبسط اسبابه

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it is also perfectly understandable why the purification of the soul is considered an integral part of the methodology of knowledge.

The soul is like a glass lamp, and knowledge Is light (-giving fire), and the wisdom of God is the oil. If it is lit, you are alive, And if it is darkened, you are dead,

You must never forget that dealing with a monarch is not like dealing with an ordinary man,” Ibn Sina said. “A king is not like you or me. He drops a hand carelessly and someone like us is put to death. Or he wiggles a finger and someone is allowed to live. That is absolute power, and no man born of woman is able to resist it. It drives even the best of monarchs slightly mad.

At night I would return home, set out a lamp before me, and devote myself to reading and writing. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. Then I would return to reading. And whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dream; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep. I continued in this until all of the sciences were deeply rooted within me and I understood them as is humanly possible. Everything which I knew at the time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything to it to this day. Thus I mastered the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences, and I had now reached the science.

I am the sun I am the sea I am the one By infinity I am the spark I am the light I am the dark And I am the night I am Iran I am Xerxes I am Zal’s son And I am a beast I am God’s own Emissary Colour my heart Red, white and green I am Ferdowsi I am Hafez I am Saadi Rolled all in one breath Ibn Sina Omar Khayyam Look at me now Bundled in one I am the present I am the past I am the future My presence will last I am Ismail My soul is unleashed ‘Till the day at least The sun sets in the east

It is not surprising that Ibn Sina is a national icon in Iran today, and one can find countless schools and hospitals named after him in many countries around the world. Indeed, his legacy stretches even further, for there is an 'Avicenna' crater on the moon, and in 1980 every member country of Unesco celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of Ibn Sina's birth. As a philosopher he is referred to as the Aristotle of Islam; as a physician he is known as the Galen of Islam.

[c] As for praise and blame, these have just two objects. One is to incite a doer of good to repeat the like act which is willed to proceed from him; the second is to scare the one from whom the act has occurred from repeating the like of it, and [ensure] that the one from whom that act has not occurred will abstain from doing what is not willed to proceed from him, though it is in his capacity to do it.

غذای روح بود باده رحیق الحق که رنگ او کند از دور رنگ گل را دق به رنگ زنگ زداید ز جان اندوهگین همای گردد اگر جرعه‌ای بنوشد بق به طعم، تلخ چوپند پدر و لیک مفید به پیش مبطل، باطل به نزد دانا، حق می‌از جهالت جهال شد به شرع حرام چو مه که از سبب منکران دین شد شق حلال گشته به فتوای عقل بر دانا حرام گشته به احکام شرع بر احمق شراب را چه گنه زان که ابلهی نوشد زبان به هرزه گشاید، دهد ز دست ورق حلال بر عقلا و حرام بر جهال که می‌محک بود وخیرو شر از او مشتق غلام آن می‌صافم کزو رخ خوبان به یک دو جرعه برآرد هزار گونه عرق چو بوعلی می‌ناب ار خوری حکیمان به حق حق که وجودت شود به حق ملحق

F WHAT THE PEOPLE SAY!

The Arabian scholar and mystic, Ibn Sina (980 - 1037), declared that 'romantic love (al'-ishaq) is not peculiar to the human species but permeates all things, heavenly, elemental, vegetable and mineral, and its sense is neither perceived nor known; it is rendered even more obscure by the explanations made to account for it.

دو عنصر سنگین، یعنی خاک و آب، در پیدایش و ثبات اعضای بدن مؤثرند و دو عنصر سبک، یعنی آتش و هوا، در پیدایش و حرکت روح و حرکت اعضای بدن مؤثرند.

Saya tetap menghormati beliau (Fazlur Rahman) sebagai salah seorang ilmuwan ulong zaman ini, khasnya dari tradisi falsafah ala Ibn Sina. Saya juga menyanjunginya sebagai seorang yang baik dan berdedikasi dalam perjuangannya walaupun saya tidak bersependapat dengannya. Sikap ini saya dapat secara praktis dari memerhatikan Prof Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas sejak 1988 hingga sekarang.

[e] As for the [system of] penalties ordained by the divine Law for those who commit transgressions, it has the same effect as the prohibitions in serving as a restraint upon him who abstains from transgression, whereas without it it is imaginable that the act might proceed from him. There may also be a gain to the one who is subject to penalty, in preventing him from further wickedness, because men must be bound by one of two bonds, either the bond of the divine Law, or the bond of reason, that the order of the world may be completed. Do you not see that if anyone were let loose from both bonds the load of wickedness he would commit would be unbearable, and the order of the world's affairs would be upset by the dominance of him who is released from both bonds? But God is more knowing and wiser.

The direct translations from the Greek enjoyed by Western scholars contrast with the twice-removed translations used by the likes of the Córdoban Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”) and the Persian Ibn Sina (Latinized “Avicenna,” from the Greek Aβιτζιαvoς), which were Arabic translations made by Christian scholars from Syriac translations also made by Christian scholars from those classical Greek texts preserved by the Greek scholars of the Christian Greek Roman Empire.

When a blind man gets his sight back, he says "I am a divine seer, an oracle." With the excitement of the change he's a little drunk. A drunk becoming sober is very different from the ecstatic change that comes in the living presence of an enlightened one. There's no way to say how that is, even if Abu ibn Sina were here. Only by the great Names, or by meditation inside music that plays without instruments, can coverings be lifted. Not by sermons or mental effort. One who tries to do that will cut off his hand with his famous sword. This is all metaphoric: there is no covering or hand. It's like the country saying, Yeah, if my aunt had testicles, she'd be my uncle. It's what-if talking: the distance from words to living is a journey of a hundred thousand years, but don't be discouraged! It can happen any moment. It takes thirty-five hundred years to get to Saturn, but Saturnine qualities are constantly here making us solemn and serious. Influence goes the other way too. An enlightened master, which is to say the inner nature of each of us, is continually affecting the universe. Philosophers say a human being is the universe in samll, but it is more true that the essence of a human is the whole from which the cosmos grew. It looks as if fruit grows from a branch, but growth comes more truly from the gardener's hope and the work of sowing the seed that grew inside the fruit. The tree of the universe grows out of the fruit and its seed, even though in form the tree bears the fruit.

[1] The first premise is that you should know that in the world as a whole and in its parts, both upper and earthly, there is nothing which forms an exception to the facts that God is the cause of its being and origination and that God has knowledge of it, controls it, and wills its existence; it is all subject to His control, determination, knowledge, and will. This is a general and superficial account, although in these assertions we intend to describe it truly, not as the theologians understand it; and it is possible to produce proofs and demonstrations of that. Thus, if it were not that this world is composed of elements which give rise to good and evil things in it and produce both righteousness and wickedness in its inhabitants , there would have been no completion of an order for the world. For if the world had contained nothing but pure righteousness, it would not have been this world, but another one, and it would necessarily have had a composition different from the present composition; and likewise if it had contained nothing but sheer wickedness, it would not have been this world but another one. But whatever is composed in the present fashion and order contains both righteousness and wickedness. [2] The second premise is that according to the ancients Rewards is the occurrence of pleasure in the soul corresponding to the extent of its perfection, while Punishment is the occurrence of pain in the soul corresponding to the extent of its deficiency. So the soul's abiding in deficiency is it's 'alienation from God the exalted', and this is the 'curse' 'the penalty', [God's] 'wrath' and 'anger', and pain comes to it from that deficiency; while its perfection is what is meant by [God's] 'satisfaction', with it, its 'closeness' and 'nearness' and 'attachment'. This, then, and nothing else is the meaning of 'Reward' and 'Punishment' according to them. [3] The third premise is that the resurrection is just the return of human souls to their own world: this is why God the Exalted has said, 'O tranquil soul, return to your Lord, satisfied and satisfactory.' These are summary statements that need to be supported by their proper demonstrations.

Few exchanges in the history of science have leaped so boldly into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now often dismissed as a backwater and valued mainly for its natural resources, not its intellectual achievements. We know of it because copies survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-eight-year-old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, or simply Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His younger counterpart, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or just Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), grew up in the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He was to make his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and music theory. When eventually Ibn Sina’s magisterial Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today. Many regard Biruni and Ibn Sina together as the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance, if not the modern age.

In his visionary treatises or recitals fashioned after the recitals of Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi uses marvelous symbol and imagery. In the recital titled ‘Aql-surkh or ‘The Red Intellect’ he encounters a personage whose countenance is red. When he asks why he is this color the personage replies that he is a luminous Elder and is really white, but that he was thrown into a black pit, and when mixed with black, every white thing connected to the light appears red, like the sun at its setting or after the dawn. When asked where he comes from, the personage replies that he resides beyond Mount Qaf, and he tells Suhrawardi, who appears in the recital as a trapped falcon, a symbol of the intellect, that his nest is there too, but he has forgotten it

What, then, of the achievements of Muslim philosophy in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi, al-Kindi, al- Khawarizmi, and al-Farabi? Reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council, responds, “These [achievements] are not of our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don’t deserve to take pride in them since we rejected them and fought their ideas. Conversely, when Europe learned from them it benefited from a body of knowledge which was originally its own because they were an extension of Greek culture, which is the source of the whole of Western civilization.”21

—Podría haber ido a cualquier otro sitio sin necesidad de imposturas. Al Califato occidental... Toledo, Córdoba... Pero había oído hablar de un hombre, Avicena, cuyo nombre árabe me acometió como un hechizo y me sacudió como un estrecimiento. Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina. Para tocar el borde de tus vestiduras. El médico más grande del mundo—susurró Rob.

The important works of Al Ghazali were subsequently translated into hebrew, and played an important role in the jewish literature of the middle ages, we shall limit ourselves however mainly to the translation of the Maqasid . the Maqasid served for the jews as a textbook of the peripatetic philosophy according to the version of Ibn sina, and Al Ghazali, whatever his own attitude in writing the maqasid, came to be regarded by the jews, by the virtue of it, as the chief popularizer of philosophy in the jewish community.

Geçimişin geçimiş olması için, zamanın geçmesi yetmez. Bir toplumun bugünüyle dünü arasına bir çizgi çekebilmesi için, varsayımsal sınırın bu tarafına onurunu, kendine olan saygısını, kimliğini yerleştirebilmesi gerekir; yakın zamanda gerçekleştirilmiş bilimsel icatlara, inandırıcı ekonomik başarılara, başkalarının hayranlığını kazanmış kültürel ilişkilere ya da askeri zaferlere sahip olması gerekir. Batı ulsları kendileriyle gurur duymak için çok geride kalmış yüzyıllara bakmak durumunda değiller. Kendilerinin tıbba, matematiğe ya da gökbilime olan katkılarını sabah okudukları gazetelerde bulabiliyorlar. İbn Sina'nın çağdaşlarını ileri sürmye ya da durmaksızın "sıfır"ın, "zenit"in, "cebir"in ve "algoritma"nın kökenini anımsatmaya ihtiyaç duymuyorlar. ... Onurumuzu kaybetmeden çağdaş dünyayla bütünleşebilmemiz için geçmişimizden neye sahip çıkmalı, neyi dışlamalıyız?

Ibn Sina was born in a tiny settlement called Afshanah, outside the village of Kharmaythan, and soon after his birth his family moved to the nearby city of Bukhara. While he was still a small boy his father, a tax collector, arranged for him to study with a teacher of Qu’ran and a teacher of literature, and by the time he was ten he had memorized the entire Qu’ran and absorbed much of Muslim culture. His father met a learned vegetable peddler named Mahmud the Mathematician, who taught the child Indian calculation and algebra. Before the gifted youth grew his first facial hairs he had qualified in law and delved into Euclid and geometry, and his teachers begged his father to allow him to devote his life to scholarship. He began the study of medicine at eleven and by the time he was sixteen he was lecturing to older physicians and spending much of his time in the practice of law. All his life he would be both jurist and philosopher, but he noted that although these learned pursuits were given deference and respect by the Persian world in which he lived, nothing mattered more to an individual than his well-being and whether he would live or die. At an early age, fate made Ibn Sina the servant of a series of rulers who used his genius to guard their health, and though he wrote dozens of volumes on law and philosophy—enough to win him the affectionate sobriquet of Second Teacher (First Teacher being Mohammed)—it was as the Prince of Physicians that he gained the fame and adulation that followed him wherever he traveled. In Ispahan, where he had gone at

19 Teşrinisani 1332 Cumartesi [2 Aralık 1916] Evden çıkmadım. Ordu Kumandanına Van Hareket Müfrezesinin hareket-i âtiyesi hakkında bir rapor yazdım, Van aleyhinde teşebbüsün milis kuvvetiyle olamayacağını ve kuvay-i nizamiye ile takviye lâzım, bu ise iaşece müşkül. Bence yapılacak şey kalmamıştır. Silvan Jandarma Kumandam ziyarete geldi. «Allahı İnkâr Mümkün müdür?» eserini okumaya devam. İhsan ve Ömer'e «Yaşamak Kavgası» namındaki türkçe şiirin bir kısmını ezberlettim. Nuri Bey'den bir mektup aldım. Muş'a taarruzun aleyhinde. Kuvvetleri geriye çekmeyi teklif ediyor. 20 Teşrinisani 1332 Pazar [3 Aralık 1916] «Allahı İnkâr Mümkün mü» eserini bitirdim. Bütün feylesofların, edyan-ı muhtelifeye mensup tabiiyyun, zihniyyun, maddiyyun, hukema, mütefekkirîn, mutasavvıfînin kâffesi ruh'un mevcut ve adem-i mevcudiyetini, ruh'un ve cism'in bir veya ayrı olup olmadığını, ruh'un beka ve adem-i bekasını tetkik ediyor. Bu tetkikatta, ilim ve fenne istinat edenler makbul. İmam Gazalî, İbn-i Sina, İbn-i Rüşd gibi eimme-i müslimînin beyanatı dahi telâkkiyat-ı âmiyaneden büsbütün başkadır; yalnız ifadelerinde çok rumuz var. Dindar mütefekkirîn, kavait ve ulûm ve fünun ve felsefeyi, beyanat-ı şeriati tefsir için evirip çevirmeğe gayret etmişler. Arıburnu raporlarını yazmağa başladım. NOT: Mustafa Kemal'in yukarıda yazılı hatırası da, daha evvelce ve 5 Teşrinisani 1332 (18 Kasım 1916) tarihine ait hatıraları altındaki notta izah edilmiş olduğu gibi, eskiden İzmir'de çıkan «Sadayi Hak» gazetesinin aynı tarih ve numaralı nüshasında ve aynı makale sonunda yayınlamıştım.

In biology and medicine, there were several noteworthy contributions by Arabs. Al-Razi wrote the first book on smallpox, called, ‘Al-Judri wa al-Hasba’. Ibn-e-Sina’s Canon of Medicine was used as a standard medical text in even as late as the 17th century in Europe. Al-Zahravi was one of the pioneer surgeons and he developed various surgical instruments and methods, which were state of the art at that time and some are still used today. He is also reported to have performed the first cesarean operation. Ibn al- Nafis described the pulmonary circulation of the blood quite a few centuries before William Harvey.

In this way it would be possible to trace a faint line from the Buddhist argument method via Ibn Sina/Avicenna to the medieval scholasticism of the early universities. If this is right, the ghost of Xuanzang’s beloved Yogacara Buddhist texts can be seen lurking somewhere in the background of many of the most important ideas and arguments underpinning western thought during the Middle Ages.54

He spent twenty years in Toledo translating the works of Ibn Sina, including his magisterial Canon of Medicine, which later triggered a European medical revolution. He then made his way to Sicily to work on Arabic texts at the court of another monarch running a kingdom vibrant with a rich Arab