Lebanese - Writer | November 24, 1876 - September 13, 1940
To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.
Ameen Rihani
WorkNatureSunshinePersonalityBoy
Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.
AgeTruthHistoryGreatDayMind
Autocracy is a government of the few from above; Bolshevism is a government of the few from below.
GovernmentAboveFewAutocracyBelow
There is no such thing as disappointment for those who continue to cherish the selflessness of which is born the noblest inner self. There is no such thing as failure for those who invest in the potentialities of the Ideal of the Soul.
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When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.
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The most important in the history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa. The plebeian, who is called today the 'man in the street,' can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die.
TodayHistoryTimeManSeedDie
Not in our make-up, to be sure - not in the pose which is preceded by the tantaras of a trumpet - do the essential traits in our character first reveal themselves. But truly in the little things the real self is exteriorised.
CharacterLittle ThingsSelfPose
Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.
WorkPageIndependentOldText
Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous.
PurposeValueAlwaysWithoutWorking
Society may be likened to a rod, which only a just government can balance properly.
BalanceGovernmentSocietyMayJust
Bolshevism is the other end of Czarism.
EndOtherBolshevism
In a true democracy is the cure for most of our social and political ills, but a few of them must remain to keep us going.
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