Skip to content

If a man lingers too long at home, it shows
on his face—so travel and refresh it!
People like the sun more, I know,
for not shining upon them perpetually.

— Abu Tammam The Life and Times of Abu Tammam (2015)

Another quote →

Topics

Travel

More quotes by Abu Tammam

The sword is more truthful than books,
its edge marks the divide between earnestness and jest.

The sword gives truer tidings than do scriptures;
its edge is what tells zeal from vanity;
White blades, not the black letters on the page — these
reveal misguided doubts for what they are.

If poetry could be exhausted, then it would already have been so
by the collected water in your cisterns, in past times.
Rather, it is the rainfall of the mind: some clouds
may vanish, only to be followed by more clouds.

A victory at which Heaven threw wide its gates,
which Earth put on new dress to celebrate:
O battle of Amorium, from which
our hopes returned engorged with milk and honey,
The Muslims hast thou fixed in the ascendant,
pagans and pagandom fixed in decline!

All Abu Tammam quotes →

You may also like

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

In your journey, be prepared to encounter an array of obstacles – some steep, some flat – for that's the nature of the path.

Sanu Sharma

Travellers like poets are mostly an angry race.

Richard Francis Burton

All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end.

Lucius Shepard

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Abu Tammam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.