Arabic Quotes & Sayings

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing. — Rokia Traore

"Who Remembers the Armenians?"

I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night
and my coffee, this morning
I'm drinking it with them

You, murderer -
Who remembers you? — Najwan Darwish

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me. — T.E. Lawrence

There is an Arabic proverb which says that "Peace comes from understanding, not agreement." Agreements are more easily broken than made; but understanding never. It is urgent, therefore, and in the interest of peace, that there be better understanding among nations. As people we are one, seeking the same goal. As nations, we lose each other down the different paths we choose to fulfill our national objectives. that is why we must understand each other better. — King Hussein I

The years between Roger Bacon's birth, in 1220, and Uthred's death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek. — Michael Wolfe

In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today. — Minae Mizumura

Speak any language, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, but always speak with love — Rumi

We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn't want to be special. I didn't want them to be curious about me. — Richard Engel

Talk to Allah in your own language with your heart fully present. Allah doesn't need you to rhyme or speak arabic. — Omar Suleiman

My identity comprises of more than just my faith. I am a proud Muslim, but I am also a liberal, a Briton, a Pakistani, a Londoner, a father, a product of the globalised world who speaks English, Arabic and Urdu. — Maajid Nawaz

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 ( ... ) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times. — Denys Johnson-Davies

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English. — Rabih Alameddine

The Semitic/Arabic word for [Deacon] is transliterated into English as, Shammaas; the Semitic tongue preserved its original form as, Shaman. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

I have six or seven 'what to name the baby' books, the Oxford dictionary of names, and a fabulous tome that's 26 languages in simultaneous translation - French, German, all the European majors, plus Esperanto, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. — Melanie Rawn

Somebody gotta tell you this:
Cancer kills way more Americans than any Arabic terrorist.
We use more money to fight them than finding a cure,
So a little kid sits there with his chemo-therapist.
Hair falling out while his vital signs weaken ...
He'll be dead while his parent are in debt for his treatment. — Crooked I

True freedom is doing what Allah wants which is the defintion of freedom in Islam. The 'Abdullah is the only real hur because he is a servant and a slave to Allah and not to creation.
The one who is a slave to himself is not free and will never be free until he is freed of himself.
And this is why in arabic language the word for freed slave is also the word for master: "Maula"; like we call Allah "Maulana". So the freed slave is the one who is the master of himself. — Hamza Yusuf

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work. — Michael Hastings

Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion - atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth - and said, "Let the Americans come." Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah - in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services - tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That's where we are right now. — Edward W. Said

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic. — Elliott Colla

Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist Robert Bellah said that his view of everything he'd studied across his life was tilted on its axis by this late recognition: when mammals began to bring forth offspring from the center of their bodies, spiritual life became possible. With apes and far more with humans, the period of necessary parental care - care in order for the offspring to survive - became longer and longer. The long helplessness of the child generated a sphere of softening, experimentation, and creativity in self-understanding and shared life. This is the biological groundwork for the axial move - stepping out of fear and into care beyond one's self. The religions apprehended this long ago and wove it into language; compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb. — Krista Tippett

Pomegranate molasses is ubiquitous in Arabic cooking: it's sweet, sour and adds depth. — Yotam Ottolenghi

Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, but Arab culture is not the culture of Islam. — Tariq Ramadan

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you. — Sarah Erdman

Sumerian scribes invented the practice of writing in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime around 3400 B.C. in the Uruk/Warka region in the south of ancient Iraq. [The etymology of 'Iraq' may come from this region, biblical Erech. Medieval Arabic sources used the name 'Iraq' as a geographical term for the area in the south and center of the modern republic.] — John A. Halloran

The ward designs were co-created by myself and Lauren K. Cannon. She read how they were described in 'The Warded Man,' and we had long discussions about what sources to draw from for the symbols, drawing inspiration from Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Sanskrit. — Peter V. Brett

Why should we, the brains of the military, have so much anxiety about our contribution to the war that we feel we have to ape Special Forces guys?
To Fitzgerald commandos were just glorified jocks - pitchers and quarterbacks from suburban high schools who traded baseballs for bullets. There's no doubt they had skills. They could slither right up to the enemy on their stomachs survive on worms for days and plunk a target with a piece of lead from a mile away. All very impressive. But they couldn't speak Arabic or juggle a million intelligence requirements and 703 follow-up questions from the community while sitting three feet away from some Islamic firebrand who has no reason to talk.
"Do you think those Special Forces guys are wracked with Interrogator envy?" Fitzgerald would say. "You think they're over there in their special sunglasses polishing their special weapons saying 'man if only I could do some hot-shit interrogations and write some hot-shit reports? — Chris Mackey

We have Al Jazeera Arabic news, Al Jazeera English news, of course; we have three sports channels, and we have Al Jazeera Mubasher, which is a live channel that broadcasts live press conferences and symposiums and meetings. And, of course, we have Al Jazeera commentary in Arabic. — Wadah Khanfar

There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated. — Pete Seeger

Assad whistled a few notes of one of his native country's melancholic songs. It sounded as though he was whistling backwards — Jussi Adler-Olsen

Our [Afghanistan] main problem is education. Over 90 percent of our population is uneducated. So what can you expect? The terrorists come from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, saying the Quran says this, Quran says that, and the Afghans believe that because they speak Arabic, they think they know the language of Quran, and they know Islam better than us, let's follow them. So they simply follow them. — Najibullah Quraishi

Every form seems to be derived from another, all figures being derived from Alif which is originally derived from a dot and represents zero, nothingness (In Arabic the zero is written as a dot.) It is that nothingness which creates the first form Alif. It is natural for everyone when writing to make a dot as soon as the pen touches the paper, and the letters forming the words hide the origin. In like manner the origin of the One Being is hidden in His manifestation. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had. — Andrew Killeen

I have a good Muslim friend who comes over to my house. Good guy; reads the Qur'an in Arabic. He comes over to my house and we talk about faith and we talk about things we have in common, but I can't shy away from the differences that we have. So I talk about why I'm not a Muslim and about the evidence that exists that show Christianity is true. — Lee Strobel

I Will Rise One Day

I will rise one day and speak it
I, the Kurd, will rise one day
and speak it
I, the Amazigh, your voice
will rise one day
I, the Arab you know
will rise one day
and speak it:
They've gone now, Saladin — Najwan Darwish

I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand. — Hassan Blasim

I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. — Bill Gates

The fact that the descent of the Quran led not only to the foundation of one of the world's great civilizations, but also to the creation of one of the major scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions in global history was not accidental. Without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as "algebra," "algorithm," and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English. Nor would there be the Summas of St. Thomas Aquinas, at least in their existing form, since these Summas contain so many ideas drawn from Islamic sources. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

You think you're going to impress an American jury with [your] words? In the eyes of the Americans, you're doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

All the intelligence services of America and Europe know full well that the disastrous attack ( of 9/11 ) has been planned and realized from the Mossad.. with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the Western Powers to take part in Iraq and Afghanistan. — Francesco Cossiga

All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing. — Ibn Khaldun

I listen to a lot of alternative types of music: I listen to a lot of Chinese music, I listen to a lot of Asian music. It might surprise you, but I listen to a lot of Arabic music. And I don't care - music is music. — Timbaland

An Opera for Kamal Boullata

If I were one of those musicians
who penned grand Italian operas
where the notes, like clogs
strike all the chords
of Mediterraneans like us
I would compose one
and dedicate it to you

Yet sadly these shrill words
are all I have for you — Najwan Darwish

You speak Arabic? Tell him my name is Infidel Redeemed by Christ. — Lili Tufel

If you watch a Chinese movie with subtitles, it's just like watching an Arabic movie with Chinese subtitles. That explains why you can't take Chinese language movies and expect them to go abroad. — Bruno Zheng Wu

My show in Egypt was called, 'The Show,' or, 'Al Bernameg' in Arabic. Basically, it was a political satire show. It started on Internet by three, four-minute episodes, and then it evolved into a live show in a theater, which was something that was unprecedented in the Arab world. — Bassem Youssef

The agency was started by the tribe's economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called "WinnaVegas." You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait. — Thomas L. Friedman

Radu had practiced the poem so often he could recite it in his sleep. He had stolen shiny bits from famous Arabic poems, gathering them like a raven to line his own nest. The language was dense and flowery, hyperbolic in the extreme. Murad listened, enraptured, as his reign was likened to the ocean and his posterity a mighty river. — Kiersten White

Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit. — Marina Warner

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. — James Buchan

Christianity is the only world religion whose primary source documents are in a language other than the language of the founder of the religion. This is unheard of among world religions. Muhammad spoke Arabic, and the Qur'an is in Arabic; the Brahmin priests in India spoke Sanskrit, and the Upanishads are in Sanskrit. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and yet the primary documents that record Christ's teachings are not in Aramaic but in Koine Greek, the language of Gentile Hellenism. — Timothy Tennent

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues. — Geraldine Brooks

The idea of mixing pigments and gum arabic together to make watercolor paint is very old. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the English chemists W. Winsor and H. Newton were the first to add glycerin to the blend to make the paints maintain a semi-moist consistency when stored in paintboxes. — Felix Scheinberger

Beware to entertain strangers, thereby you may entertain an angel unawares ... New Testament. — New Testament In English/Arabic

What is the best that lies within us? Of how much are we capable? None of us yet knows. An old Arabic legend tells of a rider finding a spindly sparrow lying on its back in the middle of the road. He dismounted and asked the sparrow why his feet were in the air. Replied the sparrow, "I heard the heavens were going to fall today." "And I suppose you think your puny bird legs can hold up the whole universe?" laughed the horseman. "Perhaps not," said the sparrow with conviction, "but one does whatever one can. — Jeffrey R. Holland

And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught. — Lorrie Moore

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. — Martin Amis

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world. — Brian Eno

There was general agreement that Brahe was correct, until Gell-Man taught the squad to swear in Arabic. — John Scalzi

Concerted voices of heartfelt petitions in Arabic all pleading for divine intervention are abruptly silenced as the drone ensures fatalities by injecting a final stab in each of their skulls. — C.J. Anderson

The real contribution of Rihani consists in having given us, in both Arabic and English, what may be considered the most vivid and interesting account of common-day life as it is lived at present in the hitherto little known Arabia. — Philip Khuri Hitti

I might do something in Arabic. I might do something in Hebrew. — Stevie Wonder

Stu stops munching, looks up at me from under his shaggy hair.
"So, can you read?" He slides a section toward me.
I cock my head toward the paper. The letters are small, blurry drawings. The alphabet might as well be Chinese or Arabic. Strange that I can't read or speak, though I still have language inside my head. Words are a consolation, but not a tool.
"Guess not. You want me to read stuff out loud to you?"
I would, but not right now. If I wanted to show interest in the newspaper I could cross the table and rub against his shoulder. Instead I gaze at him over the bowl of milk.
"It's so weird," he says in a hesitant voice. "You don't look like a cat. When you stare at me, you look like Eliza."
That's the nicest thing he could have said. With a happy lightness to my step I move between the bowls, over his napkin ring and spoon, until I stand on the edge of the table and nip at his prickly chin. This is my way of saying: Hi, there. I like you. — Simone Martel

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages. — Naguib Mahfouz

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple grain. But the predicament is that the Fertile Crescent, where wheat cultivation began, has now become the part of the world most dependent on imported wheat. — Annia Ciezadlo

I believe you can only be lucky if you start out being
very good — Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort. — David Graddol

Southern gentleman," he said aside to him in Arabic. "Do you wish for me to continue this for you?"
Caine's temper shifted to a low simmer in his chest. "Your way takes too long."
"Ma'aleyk, and your way hurts my ears," he argued. — V.S. Carnes

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...] — Titus Burckhardt

May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike. — Paul Bowles

The international media concentrates on the famous, the big names. Al Jazeera goes to the margins, investigates stories that are still developing and in the future become very big. Why did the Arabic world love Al Jazeera? Everybody felt he was represented in the newsroom and on the screen. That kind of belonging is ours. — Wadah Khanfar

Eyes closed, she let her pain float away with the prayers, higher and higher, around the mosque's minarets, and up to the sky. She thought about the old Arabic saying that a woman has only two exits. One exit leads from my father's house to my husband's. The other leads from my husband's house to my grave. I'm not ready for the second exit yet. — Christian F. Burton

Abram - Ibrahim, in the Arabic spelling - was the first to worship Allah, the one God, rather than the stars, the moon, or the sun. — Susan Wise Bauer

Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic. — Amos Oz

Classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then. — Jim Al-Khalili

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. — Titus Burckhardt

I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate. — EL Seed

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world. — Hassan Blasim

I talked to Beyonce and she wants to learn how to speak Arabic and she wants to jump out of an airplane. I don't want to do that. I just don't want to wash my hair every day. — Ellen DeGeneres

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain. — Jim Al-Khalili

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.' — Vince Cable

In addition to its use in arithmetic and science, the Hindu-Arabic number system is the only genuinely universal language on Earth, apart perhaps for the Windows operating system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of market dominance. — Keith Devlin

No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer — Naguib Mahfouz

"eL Seed" was inspired by the French play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille. It was seeing "Le Cid" coming from the Arabic name "el sayed," which means "the master, the man." So I called myself like that because I was 16; I said, "Yes, I'm the man." That's how it started. — EL Seed

Udru, a language common among India's Muslims, exhibits Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Indian influences. Its name derives from the Turkic word "ordu", meaning army, since it was at the Turkic army camps that these four languages intermingled. — Firas Alkhateeb

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

Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc. — Rabih Alameddine

If there were a Jessica Chase instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing. — Olivia Cunning

Today, only about 1% of the World Wide Web is written in Arabic. — Marissa Mayer

screen filled with symbols, only this time it was Arabic letters that meant nothing to him. He assumed they meant nothing to Raj as well, and was therefore surprised when Raj pointed out a short sequence. "This is the word for 'person' or 'human being'." Daniel stared at Raj. "You know Arabic?" "No, not really. I have read Nizar Qabbani in translation, and this word is a particularly beautiful shape, is it not?" "Still waters run deep, Raj. So you read Arabic love poetry. I wouldn't have ever guessed." Raj blushed. "Sushma is more woman than I can handle without help," he admitted. "Qabbani writes more than just love poetry. It is quite erotic. — J.C. Ryan

So widespread was slavery in the Mediterranean and the Arabic world that even today regular greetings reference human trafficking. All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, "schiavo," from a Venetian dialect. "Ciao," as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean "hello"; it means "I am your slave. — Peter Frankopan

I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic. — Cote De Pablo

His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Allah's the Arabic term for God. Stand up for God, fight for God, work for God and do the right thing, and go the right way, things will end up in your corner. — Muhammad Ali

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin ... — Edward Thomas

Galen maintained that the human womb had two cavities, in which he was followed by the major Arabic medical writers. The idea that there were seven divisions, three warmer ones on the right engendering males, three colder ones on the left engendering females, and a seventh, in the middle, producing a hermaphrodite,
may have resulted from a systemization in Byzantine medicine of various separate ancient ideas bearing upon multiple births and sex differentiation; — Nancy G. Siraisi

Certainly, one of the greatest achievements of the human intellectual spirit was the Arabic Translation Movement. Over the course of about 100 years, virtually the entire Greek Scientific and philosophical corpus was either translated or summarized into Arabic (McGinnis, 10). — Jon McGinnis

Two of the most famous Baghdadi scholars, the philosopher Al-Kindi and the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, were certainly the most influential in transmitting Hindu numerals to the Muslim world. Both wrote books on the subject during al-Ma'mun's reign, and it was their work that was translated into Latin and transmitted to the West, thus introducing Europeans to the decimal system, which was known in the Middle Ages only as Arabic numerals. But it would be many centuries before it was widely accepted in Europe. One reason for this was sociological: decimal numbers were considered for a long time as symbols of the evil Muslim foe. — Jim Al-Khalili

Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness. — Paulo Coelho