Amin Maalouf Quotes

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

Among all the vicissitudes of life, which vary in each individual's experience, there is one event which sooner or later comes to everyone - Death!

I have a rendezvous with life.

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.

If it's your time to go, it's your time to go.

Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly; and there is no prophet of the future for mortal men.

You can't even kill yourself if it isn't your time to go. People have no control whatsoever over what happens to them, and they are beginning to realize this. The future lies in the time of living. Your doing something will get you into tomorrow, if you want to call it tomorrow. If you want to make those distinctions at all.

I don't really know if things go from one life to another. I don't know if there's another life after this. I don't want to know.

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.

Life and death. At some point we're gonna leave this world. Do I know when? Absolutely not.

When it's your time, it is your time.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

Death is inevitable, but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

I could be hit by a Sara Lee truck tomorrow. Which is not a bad way of going: 'Richard Simmons Found in a Freeway in Pound Cake and Fudge, With a Smile on His Face.' Let's face it. We don't know anything.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.