Quotessence
Home / Topics / Persia Quotes

Persia Quotes

Browse 68 quotes about Persia.

Related topics

Love

Persia Quotes

“The Thousand and One Nights" draws on a sea of pre-existing legends, from lands stretching from Egypt to China. But the name “Shahrazad” is Persian, and as folklorist Maria Tatar explains, the material she conveys “made its way from Persian to Arabic manuscripts in the second half of the eighth century CE.” Reportedly, Shahrazad has a library of a thousand books, knows all their stories, and weaves them together like a classic bard. The tyrant who reportedly commands her love while threatening her life is a typical ancient warlord, who assumes that mercy is weakness. In countering his murderous egotism, she wields the power of myth and the beauty of empathy. Azar Nafisi explains it as a kind art therapy: “the heroine … must rely on ‘woman’s guile’ to survive a madman’s clutches. She turns his nights with her into an unfolding drama, spinning a spell of fantasy that finally restores his sanity.” In her survey of female heroes throughout history, "The Heroine with 1,001 Faces" (2021), Maria Tatar describes this sort of spell-casting as a chief characteristic of women’s art: “it gradually dawned on me that the heroines [of most folk stories] were habitually bent on social missions, trying to rescue, restore, or fix things, with words as their only weapons,” Maybe that is the ultimate function of all these legendary Persian “romances,” and the main goal of women’s popular folklore through the centuries.”

LiteratureWomenHistoryIranFolklorePersia
Book:Mother Persia: Women in Iran's History
Create image

“In many languages such as Arabic or French, everything seems to have gender. As the name-givers have sexuality, so does everything they name, be it the sun, the moon, the fatherland, or God. Verbs and pronouns vary by gender, and it’s embarrassing to say them wrong. Some advocates of sexual equality suggest reforming language, so that people can be mentioned without gender-stereotyped labels. But various languages are already like that, and one of them is Persian.”

LanguageWomenGenderIranPersia
Book:Mother Persia: Women in Iran's History
Create image

“Oh my heart, sing of the gardens which you have never known! Those which are frozen in glass, clear, unreachable. Water and roses of Isfahan, or Shiraz, Give blessed song, give praise equal to none. Oh my heart, give evidence that they have not spared you, And that it is you who are intended, and it is for you that they ripen their figs. That it is you who ply between their blossoming boughs, Like a face, in the rousing winds. Avoid the mistake of imagining some deprivation, For the decision has been taken: to be! Silk thread, weave your way into the fabric! Whatever the image with which you have become one (even if it be but a moment from a life of pain), Feel that the whole carpet, so worthy of praise, is intended!”

BeautyPersiaDivine Existence
Book:Sonnets to Orpheus
Create image

“And Cyrus, they say, observed: 'How much trouble you have at your dinner, grandfather, if you have to reach out your hands to all these dishes and taste all these different kinds of food!' 'Why so?' said Astyages. 'Really now, don't you think this dinner much finer than your Persian dinners?' 'No, grandfather,' Cyrus replied to this; 'but the road to satiety is much more simple and direct in our country than with you; for bread and meat take us there; but you, though you make for the same goal as we, go wandering through many a maze, up and down, and only arrive at last at the point that we long since have reached.”

PhilosophyWisdomVirtueFoodHungerTemperancePersiaSatietySpartaCyrus
Book:Cyropaedia, Volume 1, books 1-4
Create image

“Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service — but how different is their cause from ours! They will be fighting for pay — and not much of at that; we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops — Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes — they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command? You have Alexander, they — Darius!”

WarFreedomDangerBattleSpeechTrainingLuxuryGreekFreeAsiaGreeceEnemiesSoldiersSlavesPersiaDariusPersiansMacedonMedesThracians
Author:Alexander the Great
Create image

“The Caucasus mountain range is probably the most variegated ethnological and linguistic area in the world. It is not a melting pot, as has been said, but a refuge area par excellence where small groups have maintained their identity throughout history. The descendants of the Mediaeval Alans, a Scythic Iranian people, live in the north Caucasus today and are called Ossetes. Iranian cultural influences were strong among the Armenians, Georgians and other peoples of the Caucasus and many times in history large parts of this area were under Persian rule. So it well deserves to be mentioned in a survey of Iran.”

HistoryIranGeorgiaPersiaAncient HistoryArmeniaCaucasusAlansOssetesScythia
Book:The Heritage of Persia
Create image

“Parviz continued, “Do you even know why we refer to it as toman?” “No, never thought about it, why?” Hooman replied with as much spirit as his mask could muster. “Well, it’s from the Mongolian word tümen, which means ‘unit of ten thousand.’” He gritted his teeth, agitating Hooman more than hearing about his son getting caught and arrested. Money was his only real love. “That terror, Genghis Khan, still lives with us to this day.”

IranIranianPersiaGenghis KhanGenghis Khan QuotesRialIranian CurrencyTomanIranian History
Book:Tajrish
Create image

“The timepiece had been a birthday gift from Arian, his nineteen-year-old cousin in Tehran. It was plastered with pastoral steel and had the Faravahar hieroglyph sketched on it. This ancient pictogram was the symbol of a guardian angel. A remnant of a primeval daemon designed to protect the Persians. The clock’s circumference was decorated with the flowers of life and in the middle there was a scripture written in cuneiform that read Good Deeds, Good Thoughts & Good Words.”

PersiaThe Rise Of ShamsZoroastrianismCuneiformPersian Theology
Book:The Rise of Shams
Create image

“Sanctions levied Sanctions heavy
Break my back
But you will not end me Many have assailed
Many have failed
Pack after pack
Blood shed but to no avail Had my share of years
Had my share of tears
SAVAK to crack
A century of polluted atmosphere This is my land
This is my clan
Turn the clock back
I'm as old as the history of man Gone are the golden days
Gone are the golden ways Stopped in my tracks
Time will lead me out of this maze Keep my people in pain
Keep my people in chains
Wrapped in my flag
The end welcomes tyranny's campaign Levy your sanctions
Heavy my reaction
From The Burnt City to Ganzak
I, Simurgh, will rise from the ashes History will go round History will go down
Evil, domestic and foreign Will burn to the ground Time bears witness Time bears justice
Our mystic misfortune A lingering dark nimbus Rise up my wings
Rise up my kings
This majestic sovereign Will be reborn once again”

IranSanctionsPhoenixPersianPersiaPersian PoetryIranian PoetryIranian PoetSimorgh
Book:Letter 19
Create image

“A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?”

FeminismIranIranianPersianPersiaPersian FeminismIranian FeminismQajar
Book:Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
Create image

“The flouting of the greybeard is also a revolutionary sign. The absence of the men of experience from among revolutionary officials leads to many false moves that wiser heads would have avoided; but youth will have its fling, and in all ages and in all civilizations there is always a permanent undercurrent of revolution on the part of the young men who know everything, against the older men who are considered out-of-date and incapable of understanding their brilliant schemes of reform.”

World War IBolsheviksPersiaBritish ImperialismCaucasus
Book:The Adventures of Dunsterforce
Create image

“Even women deeply committed to the emancipatory promises of modernity were alarmed by the "inappropriateness" of unrelated men and omen socializing in the streets. In the women's press, articles exhorted young men to treat women respectfully in public. Other articles encouraged women to act as their own police and to be more observant of their hijab and public modesty. From the beginning, then, women's entry on the streets was subject to the regulatory harassment of men. The modernist heterosocializing promise that invited women to leave their homosocial spaces and become educated companionate partners for modernist men was underwritten by policing of women's public presence through men's street actions. Men at once desired heterosociality of the modern and yet would not surrender the privileged masculinity of the streets. Women's public presence was also underwritten by disciplinary approbation of modernizing women themselves whose emancipatory drive would be jeopardized by unruly public conduct.”

FeminismIranPersianPersiaPersian FeminismAfsaneh NajmabadiNajmabadi
Book:Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
Create image

“IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.”

ArtReasonBodyAudienceSawsInfluenceEmotionalFitDiedDancingResponseMoodErasCombinationGasTunesPoetry IsLinksMeant To BeAestheticWeepingPlungeTranceOutburstPersia
Author:Hakim
Create image

“The kingdoms represented by the second and third Beasts, or the Bear and Leopard, are again described by Daniel in his last Prophecy written in the third year of Cyrus over Babylon , the year in which he conquered Persia. For this Prophecy is a commentary upon the Vision of the Ram and He-Goat.”

YearsLastsVisionWrittenBearsThirdsKingdomsBeastProphecyGoatsCommentaryLeopardsRamsBabylonPersia
Book:Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John
Create image

“In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.”

ShouldFirstsMayMadeGovernmentAmericaPoliticsProcessKingsHorseTechniqueCirclesFundSunriseSelectionDrowningQualificationsPersiaUnconcernedElectoral ProcessDarius
Author:Barbara Tuchman
Create image

“Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare.”

WorldPoetryLiteratureSunGrowingTreeColorFlowerHonorShapesDeserveEnglandRosePlantCome UpSeedsSoilOffspringSowingEldestPersiaFruitfulnessHafizPlants Growing
Author:Robert Aris Willmott
Create image

“But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.”

WarEasierWeaknessTasksFamiliarRomeDespiseSplendidIntercourseBarbariansEnmityCapriciousPersiaRoving
Book:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The Modern Library Collection (Complete and Unabridged)
Create image

“[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.”

Would BeNationsCausesFateEffectsEventsChangedReaderPagesGloryImpressionRomeExhaustedRepetitionHostilityPersia
Book:The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition
Create image

“During the rule of the Shah, arrogance, aggression, territorial expansion at the expense of the Arabs and attempts to harm Iraq's national sovereignty and the rights of the Arab nation were a constant pattern. Iraq and the Arab nation were regarded as a sphere of influence for the expansionist plans of Iranian interests. That policy has been followed throughout history by the State of Persia against its neighbours to the west, and as we have shown.”

Has BeensStatesNationsInterestRightsPlansInfluencePolicyConstantWestIraqPatternsHarmArroganceExpensesSpheresAggressionExpansionSovereigntySaddamNeighbourIranianTerritorialPersiaNational SovereigntySphere Of Influence
Book:Statement of H.E. Mr. Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq, on the Iraq-Iranian conflict: before the third summit meeting of the Islamic Conference, 19-22 Rabi'i-al Awal, 1401, 25-28 January, 1981, Saudi Arabia
Create image

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”

FeelsSoulFeelingsSpiritualMovingJoySpiritualityMeditationMovementIntegrityRiversPositivityYour SoulThriveJoyfulSufiHeart And SoulPersianMoving InSoulfulDoingsSpiritual BeingsPersiaSpiritual EvolutionInspirational SufiPure SoulPure JoySufi LoveSpirit And SoulPerception Of LifeSoul LifeSufi MysticSpiritual SoulFlowing RiverSpiritual JoyJoy WithinWillfulnessJoyful MomentsSoulfulness
Book:'Another city'. a selectionf of poems from the Persian
Create image

“That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.”

HeartMadeSometimesFactsHandsNaturalWonderPiecesCenturyTearsPagesToolsRemainsMovedFilledEndureAncientHumbleHandleNeglectMakersMuseumsPrimitiveCatastropheMonkMedievalManuscriptsBrevityNamelessCraftsmanPotteryPersiaMistreatmentPompeii
Author:Susan Vreeland
Create image