These Arabian quotes will inspire you. Arabian is a native or inhabitant of Arabia.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Arabian quotes, Arabian sayings, and Arabian proverbs.
Best Arabian Quotes
- “Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.” ~ Gene Tierney
- “We clearly need to break our addiction on Saudi Arabian oil that is a security threat to the United States.” ~ Jay Inslee
- “We were in the Arabian Desert for nine months. And I was having the time of my life. It could have been an archeological expedition, a military expedition.” ~ Peter O’Toole
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“I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.” ~ James Lovelock
- “For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice… No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.” ~ Wilfred Thesiger
- “Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches.” ~ Ariel Sharon
- “It is impossible for anyone who studies the life and character of the great Prophet of Arabia, who knows how he taught and how he lived, to feel anything but reverence for that mighty Prophet, one of the great messengers of the Supreme. And although in what I put to you I shall say many things which may be familiar to many, yet I myself feel whenever I re-read them, a new way of admiration, a new sense of reverence for that mighty Arabian teacher.” ~ Annie Besant
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“If you want to ascend like the Prophet to the sky of immortality, know this very well: Fasting is your Arabian stallion.” ~ Rumi
- “RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable – omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty, especially the farmers, working class people and the very poor. Then as now Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live.” ~ Pope Clement VIII
- “Why should we care about the coup? First, because we depend on Yemen’s government to support our drone war against another local menace, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It’s not clear if we can even maintain our embassy in Yemen, let alone conduct operations against AQAP. And second, because growing Iranian hegemony is a mortal threat to our allies and interests in the entire Middle East.” ~ Charles Krauthammer
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“Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world – ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Lolita,’ the ‘Arabian Nights.'” ~ Salman Rushdie
- “Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, was nominated by President Bush in 2003 and plans to start the job any day now. … Prior to heading FEMA, Brown spent the 90’s as a commissioner — this is true — of the International Arabian Horse Association. I guess he stands out because most Bush appointees are beholden to Arabian people.” ~ Jon Stewart
- “The other night I searched (the Web) for ‘self-transforming elf machines.’ There were 36 hits! It surprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. I’ve used the phrase for DMT, ‘Arabian hyperspace.’ So I thought of this, and then I searched it, ‘Arabian hyperspace,’ in quotes. And it took me right to a transcript of the talk in which I’d said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. I’m very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“I want to give a shout-out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and sisters. If you could all please send me some oil for my jet, I would truly appreciate it.” ~ Puff Daddy
- “I’ve been busy with a long memorandum about the whole of our central Arabian relations, which I’ve just finished. It will now go to all the High and Mighty in every part. One can’t do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it; one can get the things recorded in the right way and that means, I hope, that unconsciously people will judge events as you think they ought to be judged. But it’s small change for doing things, very small change I feel at times.” ~ Gertrude Bell
- “On the other hand, and let’s face it, there’s always another hand, unless you’re a Saudi Arabian shoplifter of course, hurt feelings can be quite traumatic. I’ve heard that it can take seconds, sometimes even minutes, to get over it.” ~ Pat Condell”Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak-blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today.” ~ Mona Eltahawy
- “The Bactrian have two humps; the Arabian one only. They are swift in battle and most useful to carry burdens. This animal is extremely observant of rule and measure, for it will not move if it has a greater weight than it is used to, and if it is taken too far it does the same, and suddenly stops and so the merchants are obliged to lodge there.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
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“A Saudi Arabian prince has said that oil may never again rise above $100 a barrel. He said it’s gotten so bad he can’t afford to buy his wife her own car that she’s not allowed to drive.” ~ Conan O’Brien
- “Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak-blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today.” ~ Mona Eltahawy
- “Pitch a lucky man into the Nile, says the Arabian proverb, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth!” ~ Nathaniel Parker Willis
- “The Arabian horse will not plough well, nor can the plough-horse be rode to play the jereed.” ~ Margaret Fuller
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“A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful,” says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example.” ~ Samuel Smiles
- “Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dissolve the fabric of beauty in which it dwells. Genii, unknown to Arabian fable, wait at the portal. Whatever is most precious from the loom or the mine of fancy is poured at its feet. Love, purified by contemplation, visits and cheers it; unseen musicians are heard in the dark; it is Psyche in the palace of Cupid.” ~ Robert Aris Willmott
- “I’d have a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books, and I’d write out of a magic inkstand, so that my works should be as famous as Laurie’s music. I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle,-something heroic, or wonderful,-that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
- “Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I’m a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn’t resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There’s just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out.” ~ Guy Maddin
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I’m very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “The Saudis are so happy. People don’t understand, the Saudi Arabian government – kingdom – hates Iran. They’re scared to death of Iran. That’s Shi’a versus Sunni Muslim, and the Iranians are Persians. They’re not Arabs. So it’s a double whammy. There is no love lost, and the Saudis have been petrified over Barack Obama’s peace dance and nuclear dealings with the nation of Iran. They are ecstatic to have Donald Trump.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
- “Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
- “The Saudi, Arabian ruling class, for example, have rights because they are performing a service for Western power, ensuring that oil profits go to the West and not to the regional population. The local gendarmes like Israel, Turkey and so on have rights, at least in their ruling groups. Others do not.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Islam is a civilization that is fractured linguistically, ethnically, sectarian-wise, as ours is. What bin Laden has done, though, is to identify a number of issues that are tangible and visceral for Muslims. His indictment list of Western support for Arab tyranny, our ability to keep oil prices too low – at least until recently – our occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.” ~ Michael Scheuer
- “Iraq, for the first time, gives al Qaeda and its allies contiguous safe-haven territory to train and launch attacks into the Levant. First into Jordan and Syria, and then into Lebanon, and virtually and ultimately into Israel and probably Egypt too. It also gives them haven to eventually work their way toward Turkey and into the Arabian Peninsula.” ~ Michael Scheuer
- “Any strong Muslim regime that threatens Israel, and we did. He said the Americans only want oil, and, of course, Iraq has the second-largest reserves. And he said that we will always replace God’s law with manmade law. And finally that we intended to occupy and destroy Islamic sanctities. And I suspect that in our government, very few people knew that Iraq was the second-holiest place in Islam, after the Arabian Peninsula.” ~ Michael Scheuer
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He said it’s gotten so bad he can’t afford to buy his wife her own car that she’s not allowed to drive.” ~ Conan O’Brien
- “The other thing about the Nights is that it is quite racist. One parentheses is that I think this is one of the negative things that appeal to people, that The Arabian Nights could be used as a disguise for racism. It suited the West. You could smuggle racism into children’s literature, you see. The African magician in the story of Aladdin, he’s labeled explicitly as the “African Magician.” He’s not a character but a stereotype, and a lot of this got into nursery literature in this Oriental disguise.” ~ Marina Warner
- “There are a range of women not represented in the Western fairy tale tradition. Husband-beaters are particularly interesting, as well as male pederasts. Children are often told in The Arabian Nights, “This man likes to abduct boys, be careful of him.” These issues are explored through the medium of the stories, but actually the architecture of the book is such that there are many examples of women who are loyal, brave, devoted – especially to their lovers.” ~ Marina Warner
- “Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she’s also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There’s a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.” ~ Marina Warner
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In accordance with Saudi law, the boys will be whipped and the women will be stoned to death.” ~ Tina Fey
- “For example, John Law’s Mississippi Company venture printed shares, and the money had gone up in smoke when it had been inscribed objects. The inscription made it magic and changed its meaning. That’s how objects become charmed in The Arabian Nights, and they are often originally ordinary objects. The carpet is an ordinary, paltry object. The lamp is a rusty old lamp, and the bottles jinns are imprisoned within are old bottles. They are changed by the magic and the jinn’s presence, and the jinn’s presence is often embodied in the seal or inscription.” ~ Marina Warner
- “Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don’t have bustling cities, and there isn’t the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills.” ~ Marina Warner
- “All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, – those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders.” ~ Sri Aurobindo
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There is no love lost, and the Saudis have been petrified over Barack Obama’s peace dance and nuclear dealings with the nation of Iran
- “When we come back to fantasy, I think we’re actually coming back to the real bedrock of storytelling. Our national or international genre really is fantasy, if you think about the worldwide myths and legends and stories that we all know, whether we’re talking about Little Red Riding Hood or the Arabian Nights or Noah’s Ark or Hercules. These are stories that cross many cultures in much the same way that dragons cross many cultures.” ~ Robin Hobb
- “We liberate our nation’s heart inside of Indonesian independence!! Ibn Saud liberated Arabian’s heart inside of Saudi Arabian independence one by one!! Stalin liberated Soviet-Russian’s heart inside of Soviet one by one!!” ~ Sukarno
- “Supporters of Osama bin Laden want to rename the Arabian Sea after bin Laden’s death. They want to call it “Martyr’s Sea.” Please, hiding in your bedroom for six years with the blinds closed? How about “Chicken of the Sea?” ~ Jay Leno
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“A little and a little, collected together, becomes a great deal; the heap in the barn consists of single grains, and drop and drop make the inundation.” ~ Saadi
- “…the prominent Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein…devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to lend outside support to Koranic mythology…. [T]he Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti…repeatedly took his fellow Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life, much of which he called myth-making and miracle-mongering.” ~ Toby Lester
- “[The canonization of the Koran involved the] attribution of several, partially overlapping, collections of logia [sayings] (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Muhammadan evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated and finally immutable word of God).” ~ John Wansbrough
- “Saudi Arabian oil production is at or very near its peak sustainable volume (if it did not, in fact peak almost 25 years ago), and is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future. There is only a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and consumption.” ~ Matthew Simmons
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“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.” ~ Ted Chiang.
- “In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish and Moorish blood. One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarchist. The Arabian epoch-the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs-was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.” ~ Adolf Hitler
- “What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe,
and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and
balms and spices… It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the
science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It
means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something
nice to eat.” ~ John Ruskin - “Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus.” ~ William Shakespeare
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“It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).” ~ Patti Smith
- “Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.” ~ John Ruskin
- “During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.” ~ Philip Khuri Hitti
- “The best blended Scotch in the history of the world – which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party, as it still is of the Palestinian Authority and the Libyan dictatorship and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family – is Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
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“All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “In the world of animation, you can be anything you wanna be. If you’re a fat woman, you can play a skinny princess. If you’re short wimpy guy, you can play a tall gladiator. If you’re a white man, you can play an Arabian prince. And if you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.” ~ Chris Rock
- “The passion for travelling is, I believe, instinctive in some natures. We have seen men persevere in their enterprises against the most formidable obstacles; and, without means or friends, and even ignorant of the languages of the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited.” ~ James Holman
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“Saudi Arabian police arrested seven teenage boys for leering at women. In accordance with Saudi law, the boys will be whipped and the women will be stoned to death.” ~ Tina Fey
- “I came to the place of my birth and cried: “The friends of my youth, where are they?”–and an echo answered, “Where are they?” ~ Samuel Rogers
- “It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so – and all the more – what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is – blind or not – a good world to live in, a promising universe. . . . We once thought we lived on God’s footstool, it may be a throne.” ~ Clarence Day
