Avicenna Quotes

“Time is merely a feature of our memories and expectations.”
― Ibn Sina

“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.”
― Avicenna Ibn Sina

“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”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Letter 19

“Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.”
― Jincy Willett, Amy Falls Down

“Experienced readers could engage in consultation reading even without an index or a table of contents, given the predictable order in which topics were generally treated in various genres. For example, al-Juzajani, the biographer of the great medical scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), reported on the reading habits of this autodidact: 'One of the remarkable things about the Master was that for the twenty-five years that I was his companion and servant, I did not once see him, when he came across a new book, examine it from beginning to end. Rather he would go directly to its difficult passages and intricate problems and look at what its author had to say about them.”
― Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age