Avicenna

Avicenna (Persian: ابن سینا )(c. 980 in Balkh, Khorasan – 1037 in Hamedan), also known as Ibn Sīnā and commonly known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna (Greek Aβιτζιανός), was a Persian Muslim polymath and the foremost physician and philosopher of his time. He was also an astronomer, chemist, Hafiz, logician, mathematician, poet, psychologist, physician, physicist, scientist, Sheikh, soldier, statesman and theologian.

Quotes



 * The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and disease. Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials. Of these causes there are four kinds: material, efficient, formal, and final.
 * "On Medicine, (c. 1020)


 * Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.
 * Metaphysics, Book I


 * An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.
 * As quoted in Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) by Maurice B. Strauss


 * God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.
 * As quoted in 366 Readings From Islam (2000), edited by Robert Van der Weyer


 * I [prefer] a short life with width to a narrow one with length.
 * As quoted in Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Muslim Physician And Philosopher of the Eleventh Century (2006), by Aisha Khan p. 85, which cites Genius of Arab Civilizations by M.A. Martin.


 * Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.
 * As quoted in The Pursuit of Learning in the Islamic World, 610-2003 (2006), by Hunt Janin, p. 75.


 * Religious law makes it illegal for the ignorant to drink wine, but intelligence makes it legal for the intellectual.
 * As quoted in Jason Goodwin, "The Glory That Was Baghdad", The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 (2003), p. 27

Misattributed

 * The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
 * This was declared without citation to have been attributed to Avicenna in A Rationalist Encyclopaedia : A Book of Reference on Religion, Philosophy, Ethics, and Science (1950), by Joseph McCabe, p. 43; it was also later wrongly attributed to Averroes in The Atheist World‎ (1991) by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, p. 46. It actually originates as a statement by the atheist Al-Maʿarri, earlier translated into English in A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern (1906) by John Mackinnon Robertson, Vol. I, Ch. VIII : Freethought under Islam, p. 269, in the form: "The world holds two classes of men ; intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."