Al-Ma'arri on Philosophy
973–1057 Syria
← All quotes by Al-Ma'arri
7 quotes
To beget is to increase the sum of evil.
The lizard's ancestors are the cause of its being hunted.
If ye unto your sons would prove,
By act how dearly them ye love,
Then every voice of wisdom joins,
To bid you leave them in your loins.
We laugh, but inept is our laughter;
We should weep and weep sore,
Who are shattered like glass, and thereafter
Re-moulded no more!
My father has perpetrated this crime against me; I am guilty of none.
Better for Adam and all who issued forth from his loins
That he and they, yet unborn, created never had been!
For whilst his body was dust and rotten bones in the earth,
Ah, did he feel what his children saw and suffered of woe?
Whenever I reflect, my reflecting upon what I suffer only rouses me to blame him that begot me.
And I gave peace to my children, for they are in the bliss of non-existence which surpasses all the pleasures of this world.
Had they come to life, they would have endured a misery casting them to destruction in trackless wildernesses.
Studies in Islamic Poetry (1921)